


Halfway

by Blame Canada (OneHitWondersAnonymous)



Series: Halfway [1]
Category: South Park
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Angst, Hospitalization, I Made Myself Cry, Illegal Activities, M/M, Major Illness, Married Couple, Medical Trauma, Mental Disintegration, Minor Character Death, Pandemics, Pseudoscience, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Research, Search for a Cure, Self-Sacrifice, Tragedy, Virus
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-05
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2018-09-22 04:27:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 51,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9583610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OneHitWondersAnonymous/pseuds/Blame%20Canada
Summary: Craig fled from home with a husband and a degree with the intent of never looking back. When a powerful strain of the common cytomegalovirus goes rogue and eradicates millions of people worldwide nearly overnight, he suddenly finds himself stuck in the middle of a fight for humanity’s life that he never signed up for. With society on the brink of collapse and Tweek’s life on the line, Craig is faced with a difficult decision. Can he risk it all to find a cure, or can he live with the knowledge that he passed up the chance to try?Rated T for swearing, violence, and disturbing themes. Creek. Partial-Dystopia AU.





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> Hello and welcome to my Creek story, Halfway! I’m very excited to share this with you, as I’ve been nailing down details and putting love into its creation for many hours now. Please enjoy, and see the notes below!

There was something truly evil about the invention of timekeeping and the fact that, despite everything, it was still kept rigidly in practice. Some awful person had probably thought themselves a genius for having invented the solar powered alarm clock. Craig resented them on a deeply emotional level. Of all the arbitrary practices of old daily life, it had to be the telling of _time_ that people clung to. Maybe they needed it like a reminder that they weren’t going insane and the minutes were still passing, even if every day felt oppressive and stagnant. Craig could understand that, but he’d prefer if it hadn’t dictated that he still needed to wake up to a blaring siren at the crack of dawn.

He groaned loudly and used a long cat’s stretch to both shut off the incessant racket and wake up his muscles. He caught it mid-beep, and his hand hesitated slumped over the “stop” button while he determined if it was worth it to wake up in the first place. There was a yell for him from down the stairs, and he decided he might as well show up for breakfast.

He took his time, stretching his legs out in front of him before bracing his toes for the cold wood floor and shivering slightly on contact. Someone had left a water bucket half-full in the bathroom for him and he was grateful that he wouldn’t have to drag himself outside to get his own. It was cold but fresh. Craig’s every move was sluggish, down to the lazy pumping of his toothbrush to rub baking soda over his teeth. He gritted them in the mirror and made a little snarl of disgust before rinsing it from his mouth with a scoopful of water. Craig missed toothpaste.

His mother called for him again while he splashed his face in the sink and he called down to say he was coming while he toweled it dry. He looked in the mirror one more time, rubbing the stubble along his jawline and noting he’d need to shave soon before his mother called him a caveman. He wiped a stray drop of water from his cheek and sighed. Yes, he’d be one more minute. Every day it was one more minute.

Craig stumbled down the stairs while tucking his shirt into his pants. He’d almost need a new notch in his belt before it became utterly useless. They’d all lost some weight once commercial food products stopped getting shipped in (to no one’s surprise), but there were times that it was less the lack of sugar and more the lack of anything that contributed to it. He guessed he kind of understood how Kenny McCormick might have felt back in the day. _‘May he rest in peace, poor son of a bitch,’_ Craig thought, as was customary each time the memory of a fallen acquaintance occurred to him. None of the McCormicks had made it out, unfortunately. Kenny was a good guy. Of all the assholes who died, he was probably one of the better ones. Craig fought the urge to shrug. Such was life.

He twisted himself around the staircase railing and slid into the kitchen where his parents and sister stood busying themselves with the start of another day. How they all managed to wake up at the same time, and with such natural springiness, was completely beyond him.

“Morning, asshole.” Tricia chimed cheerfully. Craig glared at her and she grinned with her hands held up in mocking surrender.

“Tricia,” their mother warned, even though she knew it’d do no good. The Tuckers were not gentle speakers; at least, most of the time. They knew how to be a family where it counted. “How did you sleep?” Her smile was much less condescending, but a little forced. Waking up must not have been easy today.

“Fine.” Craig mumbled. He rolled his shoulders and felt his back muscles tighten in protest. His usual seat was right in front of him, but he took the long way around the table. He skillfully avoided his sister’s annoying prodding finger and placed a practiced hand on their housemate’s shoulder. She jumped a bit under the contact but turned her head slowly to spot him, and when she recognized his face her lips thinned into a gentle smile.

“Craig,” she murmured, and he gave her shoulder a little squeeze before brushing his fingers through her hair once and planting a quick kiss on the side of her cheek.

“Good morning, Mrs. Tweak.” She often received Craig’s first—and sometimes only—genuine smile of the day, and today was no different.

“What have I told you, dear? Call me Helen.” Her expression grew wry for no more than a second, and he guessed it might be the most emotion she’d show all day. He was glad to see it. She seemed to be having a more expressive day than most.

Craig shrugged. “Old habits die hard.”

“Yes, they do, don’t they?” She smiled just a little less, and Craig gave her a loose one-armed side hug before taking his seat beside her. Whatever trouble she’d had waking up, it seemed to have left her by now. That was a good sign. Hopefully the day would be easy on them all.

“How is the research going?” His father asked. They were the first coherent sounds he’d uttered all morning, the others saved for swearing at the radio while he tried to adjust it to broadcast the news. It was playing in the background now, albeit a bit crackly, and he kept the volume low. A newscaster with an overly enthusiastic voice chattered on and on behind them.

“Fine.” He shrugged again and reached for the jar of strawberry preserves at the center of the table. He spread it over tough bread while he spoke. “I’m worried we’ll have to stop soon, though. We’re running out of test subjects.”

“Are you _killing_ sick people?” Tricia asked, horrified, and their mother smacked her arm to get her to hush up. A quick glance told Craig that she was secretly also concerned about the notion. He huffed at them.

 _“No,_  Tricia. We test on mice. We’re running out of subjects and food to feed them with.”

“I thought mice bred like crazy,” his father added. Craig shook his head.

“Not when we fuck with their genetics so much, they don’t. Some of the repeat test subjects are reporting sterile. Plus we shouldn’t be repeating them in the first place, but that’s a whole other issue we don’t have time or resources for.”

His father grunted in acknowledgement, and he accepted it as the best answer he was going to get. He knew his father was paying much more attention to the excitable newscaster talking in his ear from the radio.

Craig took an extra slice of bread and spread the preserves over it with much more precision than he’d used for his, up to each edge of its crusts. He put it down on a plate and passed it to Helen, who snapped out of a daze and smiled gratefully. He returned it for a moment before he took a big bite of his own breakfast. A quick glance at his watch, which was also very unfortunately solar-powered, told him he was running later than usual.

“I thought your degree was in environmental science.” Tricia propped her head up on one palm over the table. Her eyes were half-lidded to accentuate her condescending smirk. “Not so helpful now, is it?”

“Fuck off, Tricia—“

“Craig!” Laura Tucker pointed a butter knife at him in warning, eyes flashing. “Tricia, be respectful of your brother. He’s doing important work.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, mom. I’m just saying. It’s not like he’s a doctor.”

Craig leaned forward on his elbows over the table and sucked a spot of strawberry from his fingertip. Truth be told, she wasn’t wrong, and he was rather insecure about his scientific standing. He’d never intended to be a doctor, or a pharmacist, or even a researcher for that matter. He’d been dropped into Hells Pass Hospital without much choice. They were desperate, and they would take anyone with a STEM field degree by the time the global population crashed by ten percent.

“You better get going,” his mother sighed, leaning her hip into the counter and staring off into the yard, “the snow will slow you down.”

With one last tussle of Tricia’s hair, Craig was off. The snow did slow him down. Snow plows were the second thing he actively missed that morning.

 

* * *

 

The hospital halls felt colder than normal, and the lab always ran a few degrees colder. His legs were going to freeze while they dried off from the trek through the snow. He shoved his hefty backpack into his locker and leaned against its door, sighing and pausing for a moment with his eyes closed. He pressed his forehead to the gaudy orange metal to soothe his developing headache. The door to the locker room swinging open noisily was the only thing that kept him from falling asleep where he stood. It startled him, and he peered around his row to identify the culprit.

“Yo, Craig! Morning, bro!”

“Morning, Clyde.” Craig grumbled. He slammed his locker closed and instantly regretted it for the spike of pain the crash nailed into his head.

“Aw man, if you’re starting the day off on the wrong foot you’re gonna have a helluva time in there.” Clyde gestured at the doors to the main lab. “Just to warn you, Simmons is having a fucking fit over one of the tech’s screw-ups. I’d steer clear unless you want an earful of garbled nonsense.”

“Thanks.” Craig deadpanned, and Clyde saluted him lazily before disappearing two rows down from him.

Craig had intended to never speak to anyone from South Park ever again after he ran away to college. Clyde Donovan was no exception, no matter how close they were as children. Unfortunately, South Park had a funny way of dragging everyone back after a while, and a pandemic that wiped out nearly half the world’s population made it an obvious choice to hole up in a quiet mountain town as opposed to a chaos-driven city. The farther from society you were, the safer you were, and he was grateful he’d had the wherewithal to drive himself home before everything went to shit. Clyde had the same idea, and was stuck in the same boat. He was actually a meteorologist.

He tugged his lab coat collar forward and donned his cheap gloves before stepping into chaos. The energy crisis had led to the merging of several labs into one. The whirring machines around them created a dull roar that pulsed in his ears. Another day, another half-useless dollar. He sighed and strode up to the bulletin to read the day’s schedule.

“Tucker!” A gruff voice barked, and Craig turned his attention lazily to his supervisor, Doctor Gordon Simmons. He did look pissed off, which was hardly any different than his usual resting scowl. He was one of the only people who cared to keep his shoes in immaculate condition, and it felt as though they sneered at Craig and his sneakers with one of the soles slowly breaking off. He finished buttoning up his lab coat at the same time he came to a stop in front of him.

“How is everything, Doctor?” Craig asked, sticking to formalities to avoid getting a verbal beating. He really did not look pleased today and Craig didn’t feel like facing his wrath when he could easily slip through the cracks instead.

“I wanted to speak with you, if you don’t mind.” He said, and he gestured behind him toward the tiny office where he usually did the desk work. Craig felt a tiny flash of fear trickle across his chest, which told him irrationally that something had gone wrong several floors above them. He reached for his left hand, brushing against the bony joints of his fingers and searching for comfort in a cold metal band.

Simmons eased him into the office after they took off their protective gear and crossed his arms. “He’s alright, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Craig relaxed, but kept vigilant. There still had to a good reason to be standing in the office, behind closed doors. “I needed to talk to you about your data.”

Craig frowned. “I’ve gone over it several times and had my coworkers look over it too-“

Simmons waved him off. “No, I know that. Your results are consistent. We’re just running out of resources, you know.”

Craig’s eyes narrowed. “Yes sir, I know. That’s why we’ve been trying to cut down on sample sizes. Is there more to it than that?”

He stood silently for several beats before answering. “They’re reducing our airdrops.” Simmons ran a hand across his scratchy chin, deep in thought. “In half. We’ll be getting one per month.”

The implications hit Craig slowly. “We can’t run a hospital on one monthly supply. They have to know that, right?”

“I’ve yelled over the phone enough that they better know that. It hasn’t gotten me anywhere. They refuse, and they’re not budging at all.” Simmons sighed again, resting his hand on his upper lip and frowning. Craig thought he looked very old all of a sudden, with the fluorescent lights accenting every one of the worried wrinkles in his forehead and grey hairs on his head. “We’re going to have to reduce patient testing to bare minimum. We’ll have to cut the specialized tests; they won’t be sending us the materials anymore. But we still have the option to ask for more testing equipment instead of research materials.”

Craig’s hands flew to each other and he spun his ring rapidly around his finger. “The research is essential, Gordon. We can’t just cut the research. If we don’t keep working toward a cure, none of the people out here in the middle of nowhere are going to make it. That’s fact.”

Gordon placed a hand on Craig’s shoulder and it felt heavier than anything he’d ever carried on his back, excluding one small, barely-living thing, once. “I know this is personal for you, Craig, but we have to think about the patients who are dying for fully preventable reasons. It’s what we signed up for by working for the sick.”

Craig glared. “It’s what _you_ signed up for. I never signed up to work at a hospital. For any of this.” He knew he was being somewhat unprofessional, but Simmons was frequently a forgiving man. He’d forgive him for the rage that was quickly coming to a boil at what the man was insinuating. Like hell he was going to drop research. Not when family laid three stories above him waiting for help.

“I know, but it’s the hand you were dealt. The one all of us were dealt. I’m offering you the choice now, but soon it won’t be a choice. Eventually, you’re going to lose support for the department. It’s a matter of when.” He patted his back in what he was sure was supposed to be comfort, but it only made his knees feel like buckling under the pressure. “I’m sorry, Craig.”

“They’re killing us. Town by town, they’re killing us off.”

“I know.”

Craig left the room, and Simmons let him silently. He was going to have to deal with him breaking for the first hour of his shift. Fuck it. Fuck all of it. Anger fueled his steps, but fear was what shook him to the core. He wouldn’t let this happen, wouldn’t leave him to die. He’d promised.

 

* * *

 

The nurses waved him in, used to his regular visits. They all knew him by name, and he knew a solid half of them as well. Staff was always changing, though. He couldn’t always keep up. Nothing was permanent, and nothing had ever solidified that truth quite the way the virus had.

He knocked on the door gently before pushing through, forcing his worries to abandon him at the door. In a strange way, this room was the safest place he’d known in months, even if it smelled like cheap hand sanitizer and held too much of the color white.

Craig stepped lightly, trying to make as little noise on the linoleum as possible. It was still early, and he was still sleeping swaddled in white sheets and his favorite blanket. His mouth was open just slightly, and Craig cherished the gentle rise and fall of his chest for steady breaths. Unfortunately, he was an extremely light sleeper, and he woke with a start and blinked his eyes rapidly at the sudden light assaulting his eyes.

He turned to look at him, and Craig prayed that he would recognize him, today more than most. Craig needed Tweek today. Not sick Tweek, who often forgot too many painful things. A smile stretched his lips, and Craig let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. “Craig,” he whispered, voice hoarse from the grogginess, and he stretched his arms out in front of him and made grabby hands at him.

Craig chuckled, and he strode the rest of the way across the room and into an awkwardly bent hug. He slipped his hand around Tweek’s back and closed his eyes in relief at the familiar cold of Tweek’s arms sliding around his neck. “Good morning.” Craig mumbled into his untamed hair.

Tweek whined. “It’s so early, why did you wake me up so early?”

“I know it’s early baby, I’m sorry.” He threaded his fingers through his hair at the back of his head and pressed a kiss to his temple before pulling away, sitting in the reserved chair kept to the side just for him. “I wanted to see you before I start work.”

“Work?” Tweek asked, his brow wrinkling as he tried to recall. “Why did you come all the way out to the hospital? The shop is so far away.”

Craig’s heart sank, but he didn’t let it change his soft inflection. “I don’t work at the shop anymore, remember? I work here, at the hospital now, ever since we came here together. I got a degree in environmental sciences.”

“You did?” Tweek asked, his beautiful green eyes staring deeply into Craig’s soul in a way that convinced him that Tweek truly remembered all of it, somewhere in his addled brain. He was convinced the memories weren’t being destroyed— only blocked, and unpredictably. His recollection changed regularly, and his puzzle was constantly getting torn apart before he could put the whole thing together. Craig could tell how tired Tweek was, how taxing it was on his entire being to be unsure of so much.

“Yes, _we_ did, together.” Craig insisted. He cupped his hand on the gentle curve of his cheek, running the pad of his thumb across soft skin slowly to memorize it as he so often had, but so often repeated. The _‘what if’_ that plagued him echoed in his thoughts, threatening of last times, or last chances. He leaned forward and placed another kiss in between his eyebrows, reveling in the familiarity of it. When he pulled back to take in his face and all its unique beauty, he watched the light slowly bleed out of Tweek’s eyes, dulling them and glossing them over until they looked straight at Craig and yet at nothing at all.

Craig knew that when his face went vacant, it was the end of his Tweek and the beginning of sick Tweek. He usually took it as his cue to leave.

Craig sighed and fell back into his chair, too tired to sit up or lean forward into the lap of the boy who broke his heart more times than he could count. He stared for a while. He watched Tweek continue to breathe evenly and gently as though nothing were wrong except for the way his body looked so horribly idle, propped up and looking ahead but not really seeing. His mouth was ajar the way it had been when he was asleep, and Craig wished he were still asleep. He was more alive then.

When he finished mapping the glow of every star in Tweek’s sun-kissed freckles, he finally stood. He raked his hand through wild blond hair one last time, then let his arms hang limply to his sides. His gaze flashed over Tweek, remembering every tiny thing that made him fall in love in the first place and finding all that he could in the version of his husband he’d been forced to accept. He twisted his wedding band around his ring finger, another cruel reminder.

“I’m not giving up, you know.” He said softly, even though he knew Tweek would likely not hear a word of it. “I’m not as smart as the doctors, or most of my coworkers, but that hasn’t stopped me before. You know how stubborn I can be.” His shoulders shook slightly in a humorless laugh.

Sunlight streamed in on them both, and Craig let the warmth of its rays comfort him as it traced lines of gold into the folds of Tweek’s sheets and his unkempt hair. He looked horribly small and Craig felt as though he towered over him, Tweek shrunken into a child’s vulnerable body despite lanky bones that had grown alongside Craig’s to adulthood. The sea of browns and greens that captured him so easily taunted him now, with their lack of focus and color just as striking as when Tweek was lucid. The virus had done so many ugly things, but Craig thought the ugliest was taking away the sharp focus of his eyes.

He wasn’t sure how long he stood there, dissociating from reality into memories where Tweek was healthy and whole, but he knew it was long enough for Tweek to begin to tremble. His arms began to shake, and it was with heavy recognition that Craig saw the slightly red marks of past restraints in his wrists, marks that would soon be irritated again as soon as Craig left the premises. He selfishly waited, longer than he should have, taking every second to drink in everything that was left of Tweek before he left. Tweek blinked his glassy eyes harder than usual and a tear from his body’s strain escaped them, and that was when Craig found the strength to tear his eyes away. He turned from him, slow steps feeling like earthquakes beneath his sneakers as he reached for the door.

His hand hesitated over the door handle. He turned back, and he saw the way the sun drew a halo around his husband in a way that almost disguised his shaking and accented his silvery, imaginary wings. “I love you, Tweek,” Craig said, feeling his heart cracking with each syllable, the _‘what if’_ deafening him from the inside.

“I love you too, Craig.”

He choked back a gasp and twirled fully around, door handle abandoned in a moment of stunned disbelief. He strained his eyes to see past the heavenly light surrounding him, and sure enough, Tweek had stopped his quivering and was looking at him with the loving glow that only he could conjure. He hardly ever regained mental consciousness so quickly. Craig’s heart swelled at the perfect clarity in his eyes. He smiled, took a step forward, ready to hold Tweek’s face in his hands and kiss him silly, repeat his declaration over and over and—

“Hurry up and get to the shop, already. We can’t buy our rings if you don’t go to work.” He smiled.

Craig swallowed hard over the lump that had rematerialized in his throat. The golden band that matched his own twinkled in the sunlight, forgotten, on Tweek’s slender hand.

“Yeah, alright,” Craig managed to croak, and he left.

“You may want to keep an eye on him, Linda.” The nurse nodded, but she had already collected the arsenal of restraints to place upon his husband’s beaten body anyway. Of course, they anticipated this with each visit. The virus was cruelly predictable.

Craig left to the tune of the nurse’s coos as she eased open Tweek’s door and explained the restraint procedure in a fake falsetto. He swallowed each breath with more difficulty than the last, and it was not until the doors to the elevator closed that he allowed himself to breathe as unevenly as he felt.

 _'I’m not giving up, I’m not giving up,’_ he chanted. Craig felt the overwhelming anxiety of it all reel in his chest, momentarily uncontrolled and terrifying, before sucking in a deep breath and fighting it down beneath his mantra. _‘I’m not giving up, I’m not giving up,’_ he thought, and the elevator doors opened while he combed through his hair and wiped away the tiny excess of tears he’d been unable to hold back when he felt a lifetime of fear flash before his eyes. The panic still buzzed behind his lungs, trapped in his rib cage where it could not escape.

He carried on, for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve got a solid half of a plot put together for this already, but I want to know if anyone would want me to continue this. Please let me know in a comment! If you made it this far, thank you for reading, and I appreciate your continued support. Until next time?


	2. II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Craig begins to come to terms with the looming deadline the hospital has placed on his research, and what that means for himself, the patients, and most importantly, Tweek. Clinging to tiny happinesses is the best chance he has to keep his morale, and another present from the outside world is just the solution to keep him moving forward, no matter how daunting the obstacles may be.

The walk home was unpleasant, in one word. Snow had started to fall a few hours into Craig’s shift and had only just begun to let up. The new flakes repainted the world white, to conceal the muddy sludge that old shoes and melting ice created.

Craig lifted a hand to hood his eyes against the glaring setting sun. Though it was probably a trick of his own mind, he thought the sunsets and sunrises were prettier somehow ever since half the population keeled over. The pastel sherbet colors seemed more intense. Maybe it was because almost all of the overhead traffic had ceased months ago, save for the occasional airdrop. Maybe Clyde would know; he kind of studied this once upon a time.

_Crunch, crunch, crunch,_ Craig’s shoes stomped into the ground, creating a new path that likely only a handful of people would use. People stayed put now, especially in the cold. He could sometimes catch the distant giggling of a handful of kids playing outdoors, but not today. He sniffed loudly, which did nothing to halt the ticklish dripping of his frozen nose, and continued on.

If South Park seemed like a ghost town normally, it was even more so in the dead of winter. Craig’s only companion was the loud whistling of the wind as he trudged through slush. The boarded up windows on the houses around him were the instruments of the breeze, along with the swinging abandoned doors and old chimes left behind. Craig used to like the sound of wind chimes against a front door. Now it only reminded him of these streets, where the houses lay barren with only the tinkling of metal pipes to remind him that people once lived here. It was sobering, and depressing. The Stevens house had practically collapsed into itself.

The worst part of his walk, Craig thought, was passing the old Tweak residence. It looked the same as the other homes with chipped paint and missing siding and one busted open window, but it was personal. He had spent many days, holidays, and weekends holed up in Tweek’s bedroom over the course of several years. Looking at the front door always reminded him of Richard Tweak welcoming him a little too enthusiastically, which always made his heart heavier until he safely passed the house’s mile wide radius of bad energy. Helen had no other option but to join the Tuckers under their dilapidated yet homely roof, due to her declining mental health and the loss of her husband and ill son. _‘Terminally, terminally ill!’_ grotesque demons squeaked into Craig’s ear, but he mentally shoved them aside. He had promises to keep, and no time for such thoughts.

The jingly bells on their front door rattled when he opened and shut it, and he therefore didn’t bother to announce his return. He worked at getting his shoes off and counted down the seconds to when he could sit down and give his aching feet a rest. While he untied his second shoe, he saw the form of his sister sway into the foyer and lean against the entryway. He grunted a curt ‘hey’ to acknowledge her.

“Did you have a good day at work?” Tricia asked, and Craig looked up at her only after having tugged his shoes off and set them down on the rack to dry. She didn’t look particularly interested in his answer, which he expected. He knew what she really cared about.

“Tweek is fine, if that’s all you’re asking.” Craig muttered. Tricia huffed and crossed her arms. She leaned harder into the pillar beside her in a way that accented the subtle pop of her hips. Tricia had grown up a remarkable amount in the past few years and it unsettled him. At eighteen, she made a fully capable adult woman, and any reminders of that fact only served to make Craig feel like an old man.

“I did want to know how he was, yes. Helen was asking about him.” Craig raised his eyebrows at that. She rarely had the presence of mind to show interest in her son’s whereabouts. Tricia must have noticed, because she nodded as though he’d spoken aloud. “Yeah, I know. She’s doing pretty well lately. I think she’s starting to come out of her episode a bit.”

Craig couldn’t help but smile at the thought. Helen was just as much a mother to him as his own, and to hear that her depressive episode was waning was just the positive news he needed. “That’s great,” he said, and meant it, and he padded from the door and toward the living room in damp socks. Tricia followed him.

“You seem gloomier than usual, and that’s saying a lot.” Tricia sat down on the couch to face him on the adjacent chair. Craig sighed and contemplated the pros and cons of telling her about the funding. On one hand, carrying the burden alone would be more tiresome than getting to let out some of the steam. He’d learned the importance of not bottling up his emotions at Tweek’s careful mentoring, who learned it in therapy once upon a time. On the other hand, Craig wondered if her potential disapproval of his desire to keep trying despite orders not to would discourage him. The first hand won out, just slightly, because it was Tricia and despite the fact they got under each other’s skin day and night, he loved her and valued her input.

“The hospital is cutting my funding. Entirely, I think.” He rested his forehead in his hand, and realized he’d been doing that quite a lot lately.

Tricia’s nose wrinkled. “Why?”

“I don’t think they know exactly, but it’s somewhat out of the hospital’s hands. I guess the airdrops are getting cut in half and we need to focus supplies on treating the patients who—” he cut himself off, unwilling to finish the thought out loud. _‘The patients who still have a chance,’_ the demons whispered.

Tricia caught the implications in his face, he was sure. “So they’re cutting the research.” Craig nodded. The sympathy on Tricia’s face made him clench his jaw. He swore everyone considered Tweek a lost cause except him. It infuriated him, for several reasons. Tweek was strong. He’d get through this. He _had_ to. “I know how much it means to you. I’m sorry.” She spoke deliberately, genuinely, and Craig had to look away from her sad eyes. He knew she was mourning Tweek before he even hit the ground, and it only served to make him angrier.

“I’m not giving up,” he said, and somehow the conviction in his voice had dropped to a frailty he hated to admit. What he’d earlier declared in absolute confidence had deflated to something feeble and afraid. Tricia knew him well enough not to comment on it, which he appreciated.

“I know,” she said. She sounded confident in his stead, and that warmed him considerably. Maybe he wasn’t the only one rooting for his husband. That, or nobody wanted to tell Craig the truth. At that moment, he couldn’t be sure which it was that touched her tone of voice. He picked the one that felt better.

“Where is everyone?” He asked.

“Mom and Dad went out to get food from the truck, and Helen’s upstairs. They should be back soon.” Craig nodded, and stood too quickly so that stars danced in his vision. He hadn’t slept well in ages, and it was wearing on him. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem a day off was in the cards, especially not now. He had promises to keep.

Craig stayed awake long enough to greet his parents when they came home from the ‘shopping’ and cooked a quick meal. His father was especially excited that the shipment had managed to snag a few small pastries to indulge in. They each ate a tiny sliver of pie after dinner, and Craig savored each apple slice as though it was his last, as they all did.

He later stared up at the ceiling while he struggled to find the peace of mind to sleep, tracing the worn out shadows of old glowing stars that stretched across the entire canvas. Tweek had helped him put them up, and had watched him lovingly create constellations with glow in the dark paint. Half the stars had either fallen or lost their shine by now, but the constellations remained bright as ever under the waning moon. He sighed, and snuggled into his pillow a little tighter. Sometimes he wished everything didn’t remind him of Tweek. He fell asleep to the confusing fear that told him that he had promised not to give up, but he had no idea how to do that.

 

* * *

 

Craig walked the halls to Tweek’s ward with an extra spring in his step on his lunch break. Clyde had greeted him in the locker room with his usual enthusiasm that bordered on annoying, but any resentment Craig felt rushed from him at the sight of a nondescript paper bag in his hands. “Kenny managed to snag this one, somehow. I dunno how he does it.” Clyde shook his head, and Craig tried not to seem too eager to grab it from him. “Check out the last one on side A. I think it suits you guys.”

He nodded at the regular nurses and knocked three times on Tweek’s door before swinging it open. A head of wiry hair swiveled at the sound and the smile he adored crept over pale lips. “Craig,” he said, but it was in the special soft, lowered tone of voice he loved that Tweek only used to greet him.

Craig stepped all the way into the room and shut the door quietly behind him. Tweek made no move to stand from his spot on the floor, in front of a blooming cherry tree etched into the wall with colorful pencils. It was a new addition to Tweek’s wide array of cave-like drawings that marked up the walls surrounding him. The nurses didn’t care to make him stop- not when most the hospital was empty anyway and it offset the overpowering whiteness of everything untouched. Art and color were in short supply lately.

“I got a new one.” He shook the paper bag in his hand a few times to show Tweek his haul.

Tweek’s smile managed to grow even wider. “When did you get it?” He asked. Craig crossed the room to the old record player he’d lugged from his home and into the hospital when Tweek had first been admitted.

“Came on the most recent truck. Clyde snagged it for me.”

“Remind me to thank Clyde later, then!”

He was thankful to his stupid hipster phase for having gotten him into collecting and listening to vinyl records, because they were the only way Tweek could fully enjoy music anymore. He could actually sing quite beautifully and whistle fairly well, but there was only so much he could do to remind himself of the beauty of music without the ability to hear the ensemble. “Ready?” He asked, and he lowered the arm onto the spinning record gently.

Several seconds of crackling passed before a lively acoustic guitar began to hop through the air, and Tweek immediately untangled his legs to stand. Craig was at his side in an instant, ready to catch him if he swayed too strongly, but Tweek held fast. When Craig took his hands he felt the weakness of his knees in his strong grip. “Can we dance?” Tweek asked, looking up at him with old mischief Craig sometimes feared was lost twinkling in his eyes. Craig’s heart swelled, and he responded by returning his cheeky grin and carefully twirling Tweek out and away from him. Tweek let out an excited squeak at the motion, followed by tiny giggles as Craig steadied their hands between them and they began to step slowly, lightly, only slightly.

The music bounced on behind them but they hardly paid attention, instead focusing on the careful footwork that largely consisted of slight shuffling and hardly presented as dancing steps. “Craig, I’m not glass,” Tweek muttered, and Craig backed off enough to let Tweek take his own lead. Then again, they both remembered at the same time as Craig did this that Tweek had no rhythm at all, and with the chorus they laughed and continued to sway with their hands interlocked and their shoulders shifting back and forth, back and forth. They rolled side-to-side, side-to-side too, until it started to hurt their arms and they switched back to a gentle swing. Tweek got tired about two-thirds into the song, and he rested his head against Craig’s chest. Craig let their left hands interlock and brushed his right over blond hair in a warm embrace.

In that moment, with Tweek’s cheek on his chest and their bodies rotating in a slow circle, Craig couldn’t help but remember a time they’d never have done this. Before life had crumbled and reformed into the strange husk of what it used to be, Tweek wouldn’t dare suggest they dance and Craig wouldn’t dare push him otherwise. They found comfort in so many other things, like playing games and talking and laughing. Now though, now music was one of the last things they had to share. It was a desperate cling to before, when truthfully before hadn’t been like what they simulated at all. Maybe the sickness made Tweek more bold, or maybe they were both starved for the other’s attention in a way only bad dancing could remedy. He wondered if he’d ever really know the answer.

The last chord was strummed and the record player snapped off but they kept moving in slow loops over cold tiles. Craig wondered if Tweek could hear his heart beating faster, as it still did so many years later. Their wedding bands were clinked together where their fingers overlapped, and Craig tried not to think about how Tweek may not remember them this time either.

“Do you remember when we first tried to do this?” Craig asked, even though he knew he was taking a risk by asking Tweek to access his memories that may or may not be there. Part of him felt selfish for asking, and another part felt justified in that selfishness.

“Mm, kinda,” Tweek said. They continued to sway to silent music in the center of his room. “I’m pretty sure I was really fucking nervous,” he snorted, “but you were the one who tripped over their feet.”

“Hey, Prom is a big deal. I was already seriously thinking about asking you to marry me by then, too, so there was that.”

“Really? That early?” Tweek looked up at him with a gentle smile that tugged at Craig’s heartstrings.

“I knew I wanted to marry you after you beat the ass of the dickhole who talked shit about Jimmy.”

“Craig, that was like, sophomore year.” Tweek laughed.

“You know I was in love with you by middle school. When I found out I had a chance, I couldn’t exactly help myself. Plus I thought it looked really cool and also hilarious to see this tiny gay kid fuck a guy up over an underhanded comment.”

“Asshole was asking for it.” Tweek smirked. “Worth the detention.”

“Oh, absolutely.” Craig twirled Tweek out again, but he could tell through his clumsy footwork that he was getting tired of standing. He twisted their bodies back together and spun with him to the bed. Tweek scrambled into his white sheets and scooted to the farthest corner, so that Craig could sit beside him in the cramped hospital bed. “So,” Craig began, wrapping an arm around Tweek’s shoulders so he could nuzzle into the crook of his shoulder, “do you think Kenny pulled through on that one?”

“…Kenny?” Tweek asked, quietly.

Craig’s face fell. “Yeah, McCormick. He runs the truck? He’s the one who really finds most of the records.”

Tweek’s brow furrowed, eyes squinting at the strain of his thoughts. “But…” He began, and his eyes started to cloud over. Craig felt his chest begin to ache, which always felt a million times worse after finding a moment like their dancing to quell it. Apparently, he’d hit a bad spot in his memories. “But, I thought Kenny died.”

Craig traced the line of Tweek’s jaw gently in an attempt to console him. “No, the rest of his family did, though. He’s still driving the trucks. He brings us the new music sometimes, and he brings in food too.” Sometimes he wished he’d be able to fend off Tweek’s episodes on his own. It was a big wish, though, and largely irrational. Tweek’s face was growing slack, but the confusion stayed.

“I thought…” He started again, but he wouldn’t finish the thought. His face went blank, staring straight through him. His shoulders slumped, and everything but his heart and his breathing flat lined.

Craig wished he’d get used to this. He wished it got easier to watch the life fade from his husband when he touched a nerve he could never predict, but it didn’t. Every time he felt like he was losing him all over again. Suddenly, the happiness of their earlier dancing session was wiped clean from his plate, and Craig was left feeling completely and utterly alone.

He closed his eyes, for fear that tears would begin to form in them, and he shuffled down on the bed to lie level with Tweek. He turned on his side and pulled him close, listening to the sound of his even breaths. His hair started tickling his jawline as he started to quake, and Craig ran his fingers though it even as he felt a warm spot spread over his shoulder. Tweek said nothing, did nothing. His Tweek was dying for the day. He refused to let go until every trace of him disappeared.

“I love you,” he whispered, and the silence that followed was expected but still torturous. Craig pulled back, wiped his thumb under Tweek’s nose to clean the blood from it, and kissed his clammy forehead. Tweek’s eyes remained glassy and empty. Expected, but torturous.

He extracted himself from the bed and carefully buckled the restraints himself, trying not to hurt him as he did so. His shaking had grown more violent, and soon he would be trembling so terribly he’d be completely without control of his limbs. It was so painfully routine.

Craig leaned down for one more shaky kiss to his feverish skin, where he hoped his loving touch might help ease his suffering, even a tiny bit. Maybe his kisses held magic powers that helped his brain remember more. The thought was both comforting and distressing. “I love you,” he said again, and he brushed his thumb over Tweek’s cheek once more before he walked to the record player and started the entire disc over again. Feminine vocals echoed in the walls and brought Tweek’s paintings and scrawls to life, in place of his own livelihood. It would have to do for now. He opened the door as gently as he’d closed it.

He gave the nurses the usual cue and tried to ignore their sympathetic nods. The music faded behind him with each clacking footstep. In the reflection of glass in the hallway he could see the deep red splotch of blood that Tweek’s nose had left him with. It was not the first time, and though he hoped it would be the last, he wasn’t an idiot. He took a shortcut to the men’s locker room.

For a few moments, in the emptiness of the concrete and cheap metal boxes, Craig allowed himself to put his entire self on pause. The only time he really did was in this room, when visiting Tweek was sometimes too much to bear. He rested his forehead against the cool metal of his locker and rubbed his thumbs over his aching eyes. After changing his shirt, he ran a gentle finger over the lone picture in his locker door of him and Tweek the day after their wedding. They posed in disheveled clothes with wide smiles on a dock. The corner by Tweek’s head was fading in color, which Craig thought to be painfully fitting.

He slammed the locker door shut with a grimace. He had enough supplies to last another two weeks of research. He hoped he’d be done by then, but he wasn’t an idiot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song they danced to is Bright, by Echosmith. It's a really cute song! Sorry for potentially breaking your heart, again.


	3. III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Progress seems slowed to an agonizing halt, and Craig feels even more threatened by the concrete deadline on his research. As the clock runs out on him, Craig can’t help but feel as though everyone is saying their final goodbyes. He can’t decide if they are saying goodbye to him or his husband. He fears it’s both.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys, welcome back! Hope you enjoy this next bit- it's mostly dialogue and scene set-up, so I hope you can forgive me for that. Just wait till this thing kicks into high gear! I'm so excited to share it with you.

Craig hated grocery shopping. He hated it before, when supermarkets were too busy and cramped and expensive, and he hated it now, when there wasn’t really such a thing as shopping anymore. He hated that everyone still called it ‘grocery shopping.’ Now instead of overly lit aisles they all gathered around a truck that reminded him heavily of those old Oregon Trail covered wagons, with cloth coverings and wide-open nooks and crannies.

The beat up truck that made its daily trips in and out of South Park was the only vehicle left allowed to roam free of the patrolling officers that trapped them all in place. Even disregarding the guards, there was no gas to fuel a vehicle to leave with anyway. Really, though, where would any of them go? Craig knew the officers were stationed to prevent unnecessary spread of the virus, but at this point it made no difference. His research department had come to a consensus that most who could contract the virus had done so already, and the rest were resistant. Anyone who could die had died, for the most part. At least, that was their going theory. It was incredibly hard to communicate with other researchers in current conditions. It only made Craig and his colleagues’ work more difficult.

“Swear your face is gonna get stuck lookin’ like that, Tucker,” a familiar tenor voice sang, which alerted Craig to the fact that he was, indeed, scowling. Kenny McCormick was leaning on the left corner of his dilapidated buggy, arms crossed and all lazy smiles and nonchalance. Craig didn’t know how he did it. The guy had been through hell, perhaps more than most.

“Don’t ruin this,” he warned, and his face must have looked sufficiently threatening because Kenny sobered up to at least stand up straight. “I took shopping duty so I could thank you. For the music.”

Kenny’s eyes lit up. “Ah, yeah! Clyde snagged that from me. He promised he was givin’ it straight to you, or I woulda never trusted him with it. Clyde’s too much of an idiot to fool me anyway.” He laughed loud from deep in his chest, and Craig let out a good-natured chuckle to match. It was kind of true. “Anyway, didn’t think it was really your style, but I figured all music’s good music, you know? Especially now.”

Kenny reached for his back pocket before he threaded his hands together in front of him to crack his knuckles. Craig knew he did a lot of weird nervous ticks since he had to quit smoking cold turkey when everything went to shit. God, was everyone ever a piece of shit at first when they all couldn’t get their fix, all at once. He was thankful he and Tweek never fell into that habit.

Kenny gave his knuckles a firm crack and looked up at the sky with a contented sigh whistling from his dried out lips. Craig turned around to follow his gaze, but nothing was in the sky but the usual bleeding swatches of orange. He looked back to see those oranges reflected across his squinting eyes. “I mean, if you think a song is shit, at least that reminds you that there are choices still, if that makes sense. Like, there’s still some variety left in life that you can listen to a record and go ‘okay, that’s shit,’ and listen to ones that you do like instead, you know?”

Craig sighed. “Kenny, I don’t know shit.”

Kenny laughed. “Fair enough, fair ‘nough. I think there’s some power in that, though. Being able to choose.” Craig grunted in agreement, and Kenny picked at his lips in silence. He appreciated that about Kenny. Not many other people accepted silence quite like he did sometimes. It was relieving.

His gaze swept behind Kenny to take in the supplies stacked behind him: lots of bread, some potatoes, and a mountain of cans, mostly corn. Fresh produce wasn’t so much an option with winter upon them, and they were often left with the can mountain Kenny lugged around and lovingly distributed to every uneager, displeased face. Everyone was pretty sick of canned corn.

Craig pulled out the wad of light blue slips that dictated the rations his home had been awarded and flipped through them. They acted as the majority of his salary, and with them his family ate better than most. They weren’t supposed to share, but Craig had caught Tricia sneaking some of them to Karen McCormick once or twice before she passed. He knew what it was like and hadn’t said anything, although he suspected that the system of little blue coupons handed out to each household gave the McCormick family more food than they ever had before the virus. He snuck a glance at Kenny at the stroke of slight guilt on his conscience. Whenever he saw half a family, or in Kenny’s case, the last piece of a family, he couldn’t help an involuntary thought that he could have saved them if he’d worked just a bit harder. Rational Craig knew better though, and he waved it off to go back to counting cans of corn.

The pile looked more anemic than usual, especially for having been so early in the evening. “Get picked over early, McCormick?” He asked, balancing four cans in his arms that he stacked in a cloth bag after exchanging the corresponding paper slips to Kenny.

He shook his head. “Nah, just not as much as usual. They’re cuttin’ down, I guess.” Kenny shrugged. “I dunno about you, but I’m starting to get the feeling they’re tryna kill us off out here in bumfuck nowhere... Don’t tell anyone I said that though. Can’t lose this joint.” Kenny covered the side of his mouth with the back of his hand as though it’d make a difference. Craig was just pleased to find someone who thought the same as him, even if it was a man he was pretty sure lost his mind the day his mother died.

“They’re killing my department, too. Cutting research.” Craig said, and the look Kenny gave him made him want to violently untie the knots his intestines were making himself.

“Aw Craig, I’m sor—“

“Nope, shut up,” Craig huffed, “I’ve heard the speech already. I’m sorry. Let me know if you need anything. Tweek’s a fighter; he’ll get through it somehow. Got it.” He felt like he’d explained his predicament a million times over, but it still stung to see the expression of disappointment mixed with pity on everyone’s faces. Of all people, he hadn’t expected Kenny McCormick to give him that treatment, but he supposed the virus changed everyone in mysterious ways. He suddenly felt extremely tired, his wedding band weighing him down like an anchor in the mud.

Kenny shut his mouth in the way Craig greatly appreciated, and he didn’t speak another word while Craig finished rounding up his rations. They’d be getting less vouchers next time, surely, and it would only go downhill from there. Starvation was cruel way to kill people, Craig thought.

Craig handed over the last of his slips and Kenny soundlessly counted them. While he waited he scanned the horizon for the spotlights put out by the men surrounding their tiny mountain town, and he had to wonder, for the hundredth time, why the government would feel so inclined as to quarantine a tiny mountain town at all.

 

* * *

 

The sun had yet to rise but Craig had never joined it in slumber. He stumbled through snow banks in his journey to the hospital, made much more difficult by the lack of natural light. His flashlight bounced with each unstable step and it cast eerie shadows over the abandoned houses surrounding him. Tweek’s old house glared at him from a broken glass window, and he looked quickly away.

When they were still children and he had no idea of what he wanted to devote his time to, Craig was in the school choir. He had an alright singing voice, he thought, even if it was a little nasally. The scratchiness of his vocal cords wasn’t as strong in song as it was in voice. He still gave it up by seventh grade. Tweek always said he loved when he sang when he thought no one was listening. He tried to sing more after that, on the Saturday mornings that he made coffee and Tweek woke up to the sound of clanking mugs and raspy alternative classics.

“ _The woods are lovely, dark and deep,”_ he sung quietly to himself, his voice uncertain and swallowed by the vast emptiness around him in the darkness of early morning. _“But I have promises to keep.”_ He had hated that poem, back when he was forced to sing it. It was stupid. Even so, he wondered if it had stuck to his brain by the power of some cosmic being, as the words felt more relevant and real than they ever had at the age of twelve. He glanced up, connected eyes with the house that reminded him of his every sin each time he caught its brown siding. It energized him in the same moment it terrified him.

_“And miles to go before I sleep.”_

When he entered the lab he was one of the first of the day shift to arrive. All around him sat the sleepy night shifters, who were grateful that Craig’s early arrival meant one of them could leave. He ended up pouring aliquots and wishing he’d tried to sleep at least an hour the night previous. Across from his station, the door to the live specimens lab had a notice taped on it that surely stated a termination date. It punched him in the gut.

“Hey bro, I’m assigned for second half. I can start earlier if you want.” Clyde’s voice was the only thing able to break his concentration, and he blinked his eyes a few times rapidly to focus on his friend’s slightly concerned face. He’d managed to float through two hours on auto-pilot. “You don’t look so great.”

“Nice observation skills.” Craig rolled his eyes, and then realized he was being exceptionally rude. “I didn’t get any sleep last night.”

“Any? At all?” He shook his head. His vision darted to the floor at the first hint of pity that poisoned Clyde’s brow. “Dude, that’s not healthy.”

“Neither is the virus. That’s why we’re here.” He fully understood he was being rude now, but didn’t care to rein it in. Clyde had to be used to it by now. They’d been friends for over a decade.

Clyde sighed heavily, and although Craig was full of the fiery displeasure that came with everyone’s predictable sympathy, he couldn’t help but feel like he heard his own exhaustion in Clyde’s escaping breath too. “Just don’t kill yourself over this, alright? I know it sucks, and we’re all trying our best, but sometimes you gotta know when to bail, dude. You just…” He trailed off, as though unsure if he should continue to speak if Craig refused to make eye contact. He did anyway. “You gotta know when to, well… Let go.”

Craig’s insides turned dark with a tidal wave of unexpected rage, deciding exactly then to take no more, of any of it. “I’m not ‘letting go’ until they lower his coffin next to my father-in-law in the goddamn cemetery,” he growled.

The anger didn’t last. He felt immediate guilt at Clyde’s wary surprise. He tugged off his cheap gloves and rubbed his forehead in his palm. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, “no sleep. Sorry.”

Clyde clapped a hand down on his shoulder with a hesitant smile. “It’s cool. I get it.” Craig knew he couldn’t possibly ‘get it,’ but he liked the sentiment anyway. “Just try to take it easy for a couple hours, alright?” He begrudgingly took Clyde’s offer to take over early, only because it gave him a chance to duck away from the monotony of regular workflow in favor of the research department.

He stood in the center of the record room with the blankest of faces, as he’d found himself doing more often than usual lately. All around him sat piles and piles of results, the fruits of his labor for seven grueling and thankless months. Once again Craig found himself unsure of his next step. It quite literally stalled him, leaving the rusted gears in his brain jammed and his eyes half-lidded. The damning memo taped to the wall only amplified the sense of overwhelmed hopelessness he felt in that room. He always felt like he was drowning there, like he needed to gasp for air as though he’d never breathe again, swallowed whole by his fears and stress.

They had a stack of huge binders beside the door that was supposed to be shipped out to the hospital in the nearest city, most likely Denver, for comparison and peer review. So far they had received one binder back, with eight others supposedly en route. Craig feared they’d been lost somehow, and that all the work he had painstakingly handwritten and copied page-by-page was abandoned somewhere on the highway Kenny drove. He had half a mind to ask him to look out for books in the dirt. He sighed and worked up the courage to keep moving forward slowly, by himself, in the room full of knowledge that would soon be useless to him. He stayed with it until the sky began turning coral pink.

 

* * *

 

By the time Craig hobbled into his home, the sun was almost set. The house was dark. The faint glow of a candle pulsed from the top of the staircase, which led him to believe his parents or his sister were there to retire for the evening. He brushed the snow from his pants and peeled off his cold and wet socks to toss them over his shoes, to worry about when the sun came up (or, lately, probably before that). He stepped lightly over the cold wooden flooring toward the living room, where he saw Helen staring out their large window from the rickety old chair their grandfather used to claim, many years ago. His heart sunk to the level it usually bottomed out to when in the presence of his mother-in-law, which was heavy with remorse and pity. He struck a match to light the candle in the center of the coffee table, where its light would touch the most surfaces. Helen did not move.

Craig approached her carefully, trying not to startle her from the trance she’d conjured herself into while staring out into the mountains. He sat down across from her in the matching armchair that their grandmother used to claim many years ago, and smiled. At her profile, he could easily see where Tweek’s ski-lift upward hook of a nose came from. The light from the candle illuminated her hollowed cheek and confused the shadows on her face, between itself and the glow of the sun that still managed to strike them both as it fell behind misty grey points.

“Did you get to read more of your book today?” Craig asked, and he was not surprised to receive no answer. He left a healthy pause for her to respond anyway before he tried another. “I’d like to read it when you’re done. I know there’s not a whole lot left to do around here, so at least you’d get to talk about it with someone that way.” He didn’t think about how he’d never have time to sit down and relax enough to read a book.

“It’s starting to warm up, I think.” He paused, again. It was a longer pause, in which he could think of nothing to say to continue a conversation. Helen blinked, but her gaze remained steadily forward. “We’ll get better food once spring comes, and we can make—“

“You’re a good man, Craig.”

He stopped abruptly, startled by her interruption. He questioned if he’d truly heard her speak.

“Uh, tha—“

“Do you know that?” She sniffled. “Such a good man. Tweek was so lucky to have you.” He watched tears well up in the creases of her eyes. He was left speechless, instead thinking only to watch her as she spoke more for him than she had in days.

“You’ve done so much for my family, all of you, and what did I do to deserve such kindness?” She dabbed at her eyes with a delicate finger. The candlelight flickered in the wetness on her knuckles. “What did I do to deserve immunity from what has taken my family from me?” Her tone grew sour, bitter, and Craig’s mouth felt dry and stuck together.

“Why have I been given this gift, while my boys, my lovely boys…” She trailed off, then, and it wasn’t until that moment that she turned to look at Craig. He saw exhaustion in her watery eyes, the deep tiredness of a woman lost within her own depression. He saw guilt too, her guilt and his own, and the guilt that he believed lived in all of them as survivors in a dying world. Her lip trembled slightly. Craig moved quickly to take her hand in his.

He didn’t say anything at first. He opted to run a comforting thumb over the top of her hand instead, because words didn’t seem capable of expressing the senses that overflowed from his chest. He felt full to the brim of sadness, tiredness, guilt, stress, and he knew she did as well. They all did. What words could possibly comfort her for that?

“I know,” he finally murmured. It was enough.

The sun disappeared behind them, and the shadows that were once confused settled on their faces in the light of the small candle between them. Losing access to her psychiatric medications was one of the more tragic side effects of an apocalypse. She got by, but only just. He wasn’t sure how realistically she’d last.

As he lied wide awake that night, Craig traced the worn down constellations painted on his ceiling. He argued with himself about how ethical using a highly experimental vaccine on humans would be, especially when he could barely reliably use it on mice. There hadn’t been a cure for its relatively benign predecessor; it was unrealistic to think he’d find a cure now. The sense of dread that pooled in his stomach and ate away at his guts like acid made each breath hard. Every time he had such discouraging thoughts, though, he took care to flood his mind with warm memories of his husband.

Tweek’s golden blond hair peeking out from the hood of a plastic rain poncho, the only shock of color besides his beautiful laughter in the lonely walkways of a half-abandoned theme park. They were seventeen.

The color of Tweek’s bowtie slightly askew against his neck, their vows interrupted by gusts of wind the forecast had failed to warn them about. It destroyed the hours of work a hair stylist had devoted into making his lion’s mane presentable. They were twenty-one.

Tweek’s face the moment he realized he’d made a huge mistake in pitching pancake batter at Craig’s chest; the way surprise, fear, and happiness blended so strikingly in his devastatingly expressive eyes. The high-pitched squeal he made when Craig grabbed him by his sides and carried him to the couch to kiss him silly as punishment. They were twenty-three.

It was when the memories started to blur together and his recollections grew foggy that Craig felt the most alone. He wondered if he should write it all down, so that he could never forget the way Tweek did and the memories would be immortalized in ink. Every time he thought of it, it was too late at night to start one, so he hadn’t. Memories only haunted him, clawed at his shoulders and tore up his brain, when he was most vulnerable moments before sleep. _“And miles to go before I sleep,”_ he mumbled.

He did not sleep well in that it felt more like a thick haze than slumber. From the windowsill came a shrill beeping that informed him sunrise would arrive in a little over an hour. As had become his routine now with the deadline drawing ever nearer, he tiptoed past his family, the empty houses down the street, and into the only place in South Park that never slept. Tweek was in good spirits. Craig had nine days left to save him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've got a minute, leave me a quick comment! Otherwise, thanks for reading, and I hope to see you back soon. ❤️


	4. IV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He's reached the end of his lifeline, and it seems all hope is lost. Craig can't figure out how to tell Tweek that he's doomed him. With pained resignation he reaches the end of the tunnel, but Kenny has a curious offer he can't refuse.

Craig didn’t really go home anymore.

There was no time to waste, and walking to and from the hospital was a waste of about forty minutes round-trip that could be spent organizing data to be sent out to Denver. That was what Simmons had decided would be best, and Craig couldn’t exactly argue. He’d been assigned to gather what information would be useful to another lab for them to continue his work. It was aggravating, to say the least, and he felt irrationally possessive over the hours he’d spent pouring over numbers and fancy words for ‘failure.’ Still, he supposed they were likely more qualified in Denver, even if rumors had it that the city had essentially gone up in flames. The lack of reception perpetuated those rumors, as well as the intrusive thoughts of a cheap binder lying in the dust lost to the elements that frequently flashed before his eyes.

He therefore did not have much faith in Denver, and he figured that was why he struggled so much to let go of what he’d accomplished. Of course he’d hardly gotten close to a solution, but it was better than nothing. He wasn’t even convinced Denver had a functioning research program, judging from the radio silence they’d experienced ever since outside communication had been cut. That had been over six months ago. Thinking about it made his gut twist painfully.

He zoned out as he finished copying the entirety of his ninth binder, well aware that outside had already turned black. It used to be hard to imagine just how dark the world could be without the lights the town kept on all hours of the day. That was before non-essential power had been cut. The streets were now impossibly dim without street lamps to guide him, which was just another incentive for simply staying at the hospital. It made sense. At least, he tried to justify it that way.

After painstakingly hole-punching all his paperwork and sliding it into a fresh dark blue binder with a big ‘CLASSIFIED’ sticker on the front, he dragged his feet out of the copy room and dropped it with a deafening thud on top of all the other binders stacked for shipping out to the city. He had no choice but to hope for the best.

If the hospital was empty during the day, it was eerily so at night, and the slapping of his soles on the linoleum echoed for what felt like miles. They kept only essential lighting on at all times, which meant much of the hallways were illuminated solely by the wards that filtered out through their doorways. Craig would compare it to a horror movie if the world weren’t a perpetual horror movie anyway.

He nodded at the nurse as usual- Susan this time. She was young, no more than five years older than him, short and filled out around the edges. Her face was exceptionally round and punctuated with dark rimmed glasses, which made her look somewhat more inviting. “He’s waiting up for you.” At Craig’s disapproving face, she held up her hands in surrender. “I know, I told him not to, but you know how he is. He does what he wants.”

“I know,” Craig groaned, but he smiled as he said it, “that little shit.” Susan laughed.

“You know, he’s lucky to have you.” She smiled, but his weakened. He thought of Helen’s sad eyes.

“You’re the second person to tell me that this week.”

“Well, it’s true. I’ve seen too many people left abandoned over this horrible thing.” She paused, like she had more to say, but instead just waved her hands in front of him to shoo him in. “Go on, go on. You’re not supposed to be doing this in the first place. I’m risking my ass for you two.”

He crossed the hall to Tweek’s room in response. “You really shouldn’t. I can sleep somewhere else.”

“Nonsense.” Susan snorted. “I’m not letting you kill yourself. He won’t either.” Her face softened to a sympathetic smile. “Get your rest. I think Katelyn will be in this morning. I’ll let her know.”

“Thank you, Susan.” He nodded his goodbye, and knocked three times before stepping into Tweek’s darkened room.

True to her word, although the lights had been turned off, Tweek was sitting up in his bed, eyes wide open and blinking rapidly at the assault of the outside lights streaming onto his face. “Craig,” he greeted, ever the same gentle murmur, and Craig crossed the room so quickly with ticklish air in his chest that he hardly noticed his steps.

“You dumbass,” he hissed, though without a hint of malice, “I told you not to wait up for me like this.”

“Shut up, asshole!” Tweek spat, but even though their words were scathing their tones were anything but, and they both fell into relaxed chuckling at their familiar exchange. “Come’ere,” Tweek murmured, waving a hand in the air to pull Craig toward him. He tore off his worn down sneakers and tossed his jacket over a chair before he hiked himself up over the side of the gurney. He sat himself down as gently as possible, careful not to disturb Tweek. He rested his head where it fit perfectly in Tweek’s shoulder, and a familiar lazy hand ran its fingers through his distressed hair without prompting. He let out a long sigh and closed his eyes. Tweek hummed in response.

They were silent for a while, the only sounds the occasional beeping of Tweek’s machines and the rustling of his sleeves over his sheets as he combed Craig’s hair with his fingers. Though he sometimes worried he was being too needy requesting his comforting touch, Tweek never minded. Their relationship had never been solidly tied down to specific roles in the first place. Craig very much liked being held sometimes.

“How is the research?” Tweek asked, and Craig’s heart felt as though it’d been gripped in icy fingers. No one made him feel shame for his own disappointments quite like Tweek did, even though it was never on purpose.

“It’s not horrible,” he lied, “but it isn’t great.” Tweek hummed again, and Craig let it rest. More silence passed and suddenly he could hear the heavy ticking of the wall clock over them, like a constant reminder. He had no idea how to tell him.

“Do you think I’ll ever get better, Craig?” Tweek whispered. Craig’s chest grew tight and a tiny voice feared he couldn’t breathe, even as air passed evenly to and from his lungs. He had no answer. It seemed Tweek already knew that, when Craig caught the hesitation in his petting as his own rhetorical question set in. He could hear Tweek’s heartbeat quicken, his own speeding up to match.

“I don’t know,” he told him honestly, because Tweek had always appreciated his honesty even when it wasn’t pretty. “I do know that I’m going to do everything I can to change that.” He reached a lazy hand up to brush at Tweek’s cheek, and though his smile was shaky it was still there and it was still worth thousands of hours of fruitless research. Tweek nuzzled into his touch, and Craig let his hand drape across his chest where it fell. He fell asleep that way, his cheek pressed into the steady beating of Tweek’s heart, and his hair fanned through cold fingers that caressed his head and led him into sweeter dreams.

 

* * *

 

“Got it all in one place?” Simmons’ stern voice croaked, and Craig’s attention snapped up from the piles of paperwork he was arbitrarily organizing. He nodded and pointed to the stack he’d finished copying yesterday, of everything he’d ever finished in one corner of a wobbly desk. Six months of work looked both massive and miniscule as a pile of printer paper. It was a lot, but not nearly enough.

The closest he’d ever managed to get was the isolation of the very general genetic area in which the immunity manifested in healthy subjects. It hadn’t gotten much farther for lack of resources or communication with outside researchers. Craig also didn’t know enough about pathology; the information he did know was dreadfully generalized, and anything beyond that was learned only by pouring over the textbooks the hospital had on-hand. They’d given access to the literature when they begged for assistance from any scientifically inclined survivors. He had no practiced experience to speak of, and it made for many messy mistakes in the beginning. He liked to think he’d gotten better with time, though, if his expertly loaded gels had anything to say about it. Tricia made fun of him for being proud of such an arbitrary skill.

Doctor Simmons strode over and began helping Craig pack the binders into sturdy boxes. In the end, his work topped out into two full crates. Craig went to carry them both stacked on each other, but Simmons stopped him with a surprisingly patient hand, and an “allow me to help.”

They walked through the hospital so slowly Craig felt as though his feet were sinking in molasses with each step. The crate felt heavier and heavier, as did his heart, as the deep sense of failure set in. He looked up at the ceiling as though it went straight to Tweek’s floor, and willed the stinging in his eyes to go away. He would have time to break down later, when the work was done. He’d not quite sealed his fate yet.

As if to nail down his shame, the truck was stationed in the front entrance by the patient drop-off loop. It was probably the first time the main entrance had seen a vehicle in weeks. Every time he connected eyes with someone in a wheelchair, he felt like flinching. He wondered if they were coming to the hospital for the monstrous thing he’d let slip away from him.

He didn’t speak, for fear he’d only begin to cry like an idiot. Kenny came around the side of the truck hacking up a lung. “Put ‘em toward the front,” Kenny said quietly, “so they don’t get knocked off or nothin’.”

Craig dropped his crate with a loud thud over the weak wooden slats of Kenny’s wagon-truck. He shoved it with one foot to press against the one Simmons had carried for him, and took one last look at his final chapter. On each was printed the address of the Denver hospital, with another large stamp declaring it ‘CLASSIFIED’ in red. There was nothing left now but to pack up his lab and tell Tweek…

Kenny startled him with a light hand on his shoulder. “Sorry,” he muttered, then, “ya did what ya could. I know you’d never’ve given up on him if you could help it. Don’t beat yourself up.” When Craig said nothing, he sighed. “I know how that feels, not being able to do a thing to help. I know you hate it being said, but I’m still sorry.” He patted Craig’s back once in friendly reassurance, but Craig whirled around to face him to cut off his touch. Kenny backed up half a step.

“I don’t trust them.” He watched Kenny grow confused. “Denver,” he clarified. “I don’t believe they’re even there. You’ve been there, right?” Kenny just nodded, unsure of what to say. “Then you would know. Are they there? Is this even going to matter? You have to know. Tell me.” He gripped Kenny’s jacket by the shoulders, getting in his face, and Kenny’s eyes widened in something akin to fear.

“Woah, Craig, calm down.” Craig did not back down. He needed to know, now. “I honestly don’t know.”

Craig shook him. “You have to. How the fuck would you just _not know?”_

“Dude, let go of me!” Kenny wrenched himself from Craig’s grip, his brow furrowing and teeth clenching. “I said I don’t know. They don’t let me go into the city. There’s a pick up and drop off area. I have no fuckin’ idea, Tucker. I’m sorry.” His face softened just slightly from the anger it held. “I really don’t. I get what you’re…” Kenny trailed off.

Craig watched his gaze grow glassy. He looked strange, like he had either gotten a wild idea or lost control of his thoughts. “What?” Even as he addressed him Craig stepped back toward the back of the truck bed. He’d seen enough people taken by the virus lose their heads. Was Kenny sick now too?

Before Craig could get too worried, Kenny blinked himself rapidly back into the present, and where his face had gone slack a new wide grin replaced it. He looked crazed, excited, and utterly confusing. “Nothing. Do me a favor though. Don’t kill the mice. They’re my friends, you know.” He tapped his head like it made even a lick of sense, and laughed. It gave Craig uncomfortable shivers. “Who knows- maybe lettin’ ‘em go will help spread the immunity, or some shit.”

“That’s not how it works,” Craig mumbled, and he hopped out the back of the truck to turn back to the hospital. He very suddenly wanted nothing to do with Kenny.

“Eh, you’re the scientist, I guess you’d know.” Kenny waved him off, but the devilish grin remained. “Get back to work. Talk to your husband. I’ll see ya real soon, Tucker.”

He wanted to question what he meant by ‘real soon,’ but Kenny jumped from the truck and swung around to the driver’s seat too quickly. He lugged his truck out onto the main roads where he’d head to not-Denver, Craig’s binders jostled against the backboards but tucked between crates full of cans. He had to trust they’d get to good hands. There was no hope otherwise, but he was starting to get the feeling there was no hope at all. Denial was giving way to hopelessness, even though he’d promised himself to keep it together until Tweek…

Kenny’s mysterious behavior was enough to keep his mind off the soul-crushing reality of it all, and he walked through the hospital with the feeling that every eye on him was cursing his name.

 

* * *

 

The lab was completely empty except for him. It was ten minutes past eleven at night. Doctor Simmons had given him the keys to the lab, telling him to ‘take his time,’ which he suspected was his unique way of offering condolences and time for him to grieve. He huffed a half-laugh, and looked down at his beaten up sneakers and scrubs with half the hems frayed off. He’d been staring at the emptied lab for hours. He supposed that it was kind of like a funeral wake, of sorts, like sitting in silence among the dead, but instead he was surrounded by the quiet squeaking of a hundred tiny bodies he was supposed to exterminate.

He’d been handed their intended last meal, which had been infused with a poison that would euthanize them in their sleep. He supposed it was the gentlest way to go about it, especially when the experiments they’d been put through could certainly be considered torture. He’d tried not to hurt them, but sometimes there was nothing to be done when things went wrong. He euthanized those souls with moral purpose. This was different. These beings were still living, and living relatively well. He would be intentionally snuffing the life from them, and it made him slightly sick despite the time he’d spent trying to detach himself from the process. He wasn’t meant for this work.

With most of the equipment out of the way, it was the last thing he had to do before locking up the lab to be unlocked the next morning. In a way, he’d become cozy in this space. He’d spent months within its walls, and memorized the specific hum of its machines in harmony with the sounds of scurrying mice. With the machines all off, though, it no longer felt like a second home. It was an empty husk of his tireless efforts, much like himself, he supposed. He eyed the poisoned food. He stared long and hard at it, and wanted to distribute it, but Kenny’s cryptic words were stopping him. He’d called them his friends. He’d mentioned them specifically, but he had no idea how he knew they even existed. Was it based on a hunch, or did he actually know?

Craig let out a long sigh that took all the breath from his lungs in one swoop, and he chuckled as the last trickle of air left him. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t euthanize them. He’d have to come up with an excuse the next morning. Maybe someone else would be able to handle the dirty work of it, but he couldn’t, not surrounded by the emptiness of it all.

He found the usual supplements and gave them to each cage. They never had the technology for anything automated or large-scale. Maybe that made it harder for him to kill them, too. They were almost like pets, in a way. It was a dangerous but unavoidable concept.

The poison was tossed into the biohazard waste bin to be taken by custodians none-the-wiser. The excuse could wait. He hung up his lab coat, and walked halfway through the threshold of the fire-safe doors. His hand froze over the light switches.

He turned his head and looked back into the lab. His eyes swept the empty counters and the noisy cages. It looked half-finished. His hand felt pained, like it was a horrible strain to move it just enough to flip the switches. He didn’t want to. He desperately didn’t want to, but he didn’t have a choice. Funding was cut. The project was over. They put all their money on Denver. It felt like a death sentence.

Slowly, painfully, he pushed down each switch until everything was swallowed by the darkness. He looked into the void of it one more moment before he finally turned away, and locked the doors with a silver key. He stood with the key in the lock with a lump in his throat, and his hand began to tremble against them. He wanted so badly to be strong, for Tweek, but he wasn’t so sure how possible it would be. He wiped away at his eyes once before he finally tugged the key from the lock and walked away.

 

* * *

 

He couldn’t bear to see Tweek that night. He instead stumbled in the dark back to his home, kicking snow haphazardly out of his way with the toes of his shoes. He felt numb, and though he guessed it was because the snow was dampening against his thinly veiled legs, he couldn’t help but attribute it to his botched rescue attempt.

He was passing through the abandoned street when the sound of rustling startled him from the blanking of his mind. He froze, and hunched over with balled fists. “Hello?” He asked quietly. There was no response. Maybe it had been a raccoon.

Craig began to walk again, slowly, though he attempted to be more alert to his surroundings. He’d almost reached the end of the block when suddenly, a body leapt out from behind a shed and arms wrapped tightly around him. He yelped and meant to yell, but a hand covered his mouth before he could get out the words.

“Shut the fuck up, Tucker, shut up,” he whispered, and Craig’s eyes widened. The hand removed itself from his mouth and he sputtered, twisting around in his arms.

“Kenny?” He asked, flabbergasted, and Kenny hushed him with a finger to his lips.

“Shut up, you’re too damn loud,” he hissed, and though Craig didn’t think anyone was really around to have been alarmed by his noises, he nodded anyway. “Look, I need to talk to you. Come here.” He tugged at the arm he’d never let go of, and Craig stumbled after him into the shed Kenny had appeared from. Adrenaline rushed through his body and roared in his ears, still feeling the effects of the scare. _‘What the fuck is his problem? What is this?’_

Kenny shut the door to the shed and looked around before setting a candlelit lamp on the center of a shoddy table in the center. “Okay,” he said, and he ran a hand through his hair. “Alright.”

“Out with it,” Craig spat, “I don’t plan on becoming your captive. Fuck you.”

Kenny held out his hands. “Woah, chill. I wanna help you out, alright?” He looked nervous, gaze flitting back and forth between the possible entrances to the shed, and Craig got a sense that they were unsafe. He swallowed thickly.

“With what?”

“Alright, this is gonna be hard to explain, and crazy, but hear me out, alright?” Kenny swept his hair back again and it half stuck, likely from grease. Craig blanched at the thought, even though his was probably equally as dirty. Clean hair wasn’t so much of a priority lately.

“I didn’t deliver your books today.” Craig went to protest, but Kenny held up a hand to shut him up and he begrudgingly did so. “I held onto them, because I think I can help you.”

“How could you possibly do that?” He narrowed his eyes. “You better have a goddamn good point with this, McCormick.”

“I do! I do, it’s just,” he hissed between his teeth, “it’s just kind of risky. But I’m willing to risk it.” He heaved a shaky breath. “I think I can get you the shit you need to keep up your research.”

The words sunk in, and Craig sucked in a surprised breath. “How?” He breathed.

“I got connections up by Denver, y’see. I think I can convince them to help ya out. You gotta come with me, though. You gotta talk because I don’t understand all that science shit. You saved the mice, right?”

Craig shook his head. “How do you expect me to keep this under the nose of my colleagues? The lab is right there.” He was insane. Still, Craig had an awful habit of holding onto hope much too long.

“You gotta smuggle ‘em out. Look, all these empty homes out here, you could use one of ‘em, or two. It’s not impossible.”

“It’s kind of impossible.” Craig deadpanned. “What about the machinery?”

“They might be able to hook you up in Denver. I dunno, that’s why you gotta come with me. But we can do this, maybe.”

Craig felt exhausted and old then, and he sunk down into one of the shitty fold-up chairs set up around the table with his head in his hand. Kenny was silent, and he was thankful for the chance to think things through. “Let me get this completely straight. You didn’t deliver my research papers because you thought you could maybe get me the supplies to continue doing said research, illegally, under the noses of everyone here.”

“Basically, yeah.” Craig looked up as Kenny shrugged. “I can’t promise anything, and it may be a long shot, but least you could do is come with me next time I drive out there and check it out, give it a chance. You’re right though, it’s illegal, and the law isn’t quite what it used t’ be.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean when ya do something illegal, they kill ya out there. Ain’t no jails, Craig.” Kenny looked at him without a shred of hesitance. He was telling the truth. Craig shuddered. His legs were getting colder, and he was beginning to feel lightheaded. “If you wanna try this, you gotta be all in. I’m not gonna tell ya what to do, but I think it’s worth a shot.”

Craig didn’t answer at first. He stared at his shoes and weighed the options. Truthfully, it didn’t take much to persuade him. “I don’t mind dying if it means I might save him.” He said, with clear resolve in his eyes, and Kenny’s grim face split into a signature grin.

“Sounds about right, ya stubborn bastard.” Kenny held a hand out to shake, and Craig eyed it warily. “I’ll help you, but you gotta pull the weight. I’m just the delivery boy. I want you to win this, but you’re doing it alone.”

Craig grabbed his hand and shook with purpose. “If that’s what it takes, so be it. I’m in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Buckle up friends, you're in for a ride!


	5. V

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Immediately after the handshake that derailed the course of his life, the road ahead already looks intimidating. Craig gets his first look at life and people outside of South Park since the virus snuffed out half the population. In his journey outward, he must strike up a deal and make sacrifices to keep his research alive or else lose the progress he’s made, and Tweek.

Craig soon realized, after spending most of the last several hours brainstorming with Kenny just how he was going to orchestrate the stealth of countless medical supplies and _live animals,_ that the staff at the hospital were not so intelligent as he’d given them credit for. It was a little disappointing how easy it was proving to simply shove things in boxes and walk them out of the hospital and into a nearby abandoned home without much more than a glance in their direction. Then again, it was still South Park, global devastation or not. They were hardly known for their competence.

“That janitor looked right at us, dude,” Kenny whispered, cackling, and Craig rolled his eyes. They fled on quick feet across the pavement and to the residence they were currently stashing mice into. They unfortunately had only that night to take them all, as they’d be disposed of in the morning the moment Simmons realized Craig hadn’t euthanized them. He’d been planning on telling him he’d fed them the wrong supplements, but he supposed now he’d be able to lie and say he’d taken care of it before he got there. God knew he’d been spending too much time at the hospital lately, and it would act as a convincing cover. Hopefully this time around his supervisor wouldn’t look too closely at the inventory.

Kenny tripped and giggled to himself and Craig huffed at him. Where the adrenaline apparently made Kenny giddy, it only made Craig anxious. Every rustle of the bushes threw him off and made his stomach drop to the floor. It was exhausting.

“Come on,” he muttered, and he held open the door to the house for Kenny to duck in first. Inside he could hear the sound of little feet scraping and stepping over each other in cramped cardboard boxes. “Sorry guys,” he whispered with honest pity, and Kenny snorted at him. He ignored it.

1820 Hemlock Road, the address read. It was the only white house on the block. He’d picked it for its large and fully finished basement, which he now stepped into for the sixth time down an old staircase. He walked carefully, as the candles he had lit did not fully reach where his feet were landing and he had no clear view of the floor. Kenny flew down them with reckless abandon.

He set down his box along the wall where ten others sat stacked two high. Kenny was wiping his hands of dust by clapping into the air and stretching his back with a noisy yawn. “How many more trips, ya think?”

“There are still two boxes of the animals, and a few boxes of the basic supplies. I’ll set it up myself after that.” The last thing Craig wanted was to end up wrapped around a pole in the middle of nowhere from a grievous error of Kenny’s tired driving. Kenny saluted him.

“Don’t gotta tell me twice, buddy.” He stretched his arms above his head and squeezed his eyes shut. His posture relaxed and he sobered up quick. “You sure you wanna do this?”

Craig stared at him, and Kenny nodded to indicate he’d understood his lack of a response as an affirmative.

“I’ll have the truck running at 5, while it’s still dark out. I usually leave early anyway, but it’ll help our cover.”

After several more hours of moving and putting together makeshift cages, Craig finally hobbled into his home at about two in the morning. His blankets and sheets felt colder than usual; the absence of Tweek beside him felt emptier and more painful. He’d spoiled himself by bending rules and sleeping at the hospital. _‘Soon we’ll be back to normal,’_ he thought, and he let his daydreams of living healthily and happily melt into the actual dreams of a fitful sleep.

  

* * *

 

The sun wouldn’t be coming up for another two hours. Craig had turned his alarm clock down to as low as possible and placed it under his pillow, in the hopes that he’d be able to sneak away from his family without their noticing. He wanted as few people suspecting his actions as possible. He could already tell keeping all these secrets was going to drain him.

He hit the off button and figured it had chirped maybe twice before he got to it, and he hoped the volume was quiet enough and the birds were loud enough outside to drown it out. He sorely missed the vibrate feature on cell phones; sometimes he wished he’d kept his phone around and operational if only to provide an alarm that didn’t make him want to rip his hair out.

Craig grabbed the small backpack he’d prepared before passing out the night before from against the wall. He slung it over one shoulder as he tiptoed down the stairs, careful not to slip on his socks. He shifted his weight so that the third to last step would creak the quietest, as he’d learned in his many years of growing up in the house and needing to sneak by unannounced. He was reminded of a memory of coming home at three in the morning, after a night out went far beyond curfew. The verbal beating he’d gotten, when the step squeaked just loudly enough for his mother’s superhuman hearing to detect, was not forgotten. It was funny how a sour memory now felt so sweet, as though any problems he’d had before everyone got sick were so arbitrary and ridiculous. In a way, they were.

“Craig?” A voice croaked, and he froze in the foyer, twisting on one slippery sock to face the direction the sound came from. Helen was sitting up from the couch. A book was left open on her lap, as though she’d fallen asleep mid-sentence.

“Hey, Ma,” Craig said in a gentle whisper, hoping she’d catch on that he didn’t want to be heard. He only called her ‘Ma’ when he needed something important of her, and she knew it. He debated simply leaving, but she was disoriented and curious and he doubted she would keep her sighting to herself.

“Is everything alright? How is Tweek?” She asked, and Craig felt guilt flood his lungs like blood, as though she’d punctured him with a simple question a mother should never have to worry about.

“Tweek is fine, Helen, he’s fine.” He walked carefully over the wooden floorboards to sit beside her in his father’s armchair. “I need to ask you something.”

“What’s that, dear?” The fog of sleep was leaving her eyes, but Craig hoped it would return to her. It was far too early to be awake.

“Please tell everyone I’m at the hospital, alright?” He asked. He tried to make it feel as natural as possible, but he’d always been a terrible actor, and he feared he’d screwed everything up by trying to say anything at all.

“You’re always there, dear. I thought it was your day off.” Helen frowned. “You need to come home more. I miss you.”

Craig leaned forward and hugged her around her shoulders. “I miss you too, Ma. Go to bed. You shouldn’t read so close to bed time.”

Helen hugged him back with a heavy sigh, releasing her tense muscles with the action. She chuckled softly. “Now, none of that. I’m the one to nag _you,_ ” she poked him in the chest with one finger, and Craig smiled.

“Yeah, I know. Sleep well.” He planted a kiss on her forehead and she brushed a thumb over his cheek before he pulled too far away for her to reach. She frowned, but nodded, and Craig took it as his permission to go. He slipped his sneakers on, took a last look behind him as his mother-in-law dragged herself to her bedroom, and left the house with a quiet _click_ of the front door.

 

* * *

 

“Here’s the deal.” Kenny began his instructions, speaking loudly over the busted muffler of the truck while they blazed down the highway. “The way it works is you’ll have to be hidden two times, not counting the border of South Park.” He held up two fingers for emphasis. “When we go into the compound and before we leave. The leaving is gonna be the tricky part. We gotta hide you an’ all your shit so the ringleader don’t see ya.

“You’re not gonna do much this time, since I gotta talk around a bit ‘fore I can confirm a source, but it’ll be a chance for you to go through the motions. You might have shit to take back at the end of it today, I dunno.” He shrugged.

“A lot of this is running on chance,” Craig muttered. His stomach made an uncomfortable flip. The tires skidded over dirt and he lurched to the side in his crate-turned-seat. He briefly considered his almost guaranteed grisly death if Kenny were to wreck the truck for some reason. It made his stomach clench again.

“I told you it was risky, dude. But do you wanna save Tweek or not?” Craig glared at him even though he wouldn’t see, not bothering with a response. “Yeah, thought so.”

Craig sighed and pulled the canvas covering of the wagon to the side to watch the fields fly by the truck for a while. After clearing out of South Park, he found the highway and everything surrounding it looked largely the same as before. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but the most destruction he’d been able to observe were the broken down fences where livestock escaped their dwellings without owners to herd them. The only real hint that something was amiss was the complete lack of other cars on the road; it was enough to cast a slightly eerie feeling to the entire trip. The road was winding and followed a dip between two large hills, and it switched often between evergreen trees on inclines and empty plains. Craig remembered driving it to and from college. It seemed like centuries ago, but it had to have been three years at most. The thought depressed him, so he dropped the canvas and tried to get a few more minutes of sleep.

In between nodding off and uncomfortable precious moments of rest, Kenny knocked on the headboard that separated the two of them and startled him awake. “Ay, Craig,” he yelled over the muffler and the wind. Craig rubbed at his eyes slowly, feeling the bags beneath them under his dirty fingers.

“Yeah?” He drawled, voice low and raspy from the sleep.

“Check it out.” Craig shuffled to turn to face the dashboard, and his eyes were blinded with the god rays of the morning sun. It lit the tips of the forest ablaze and cast an orange glow on all it touched. He understood why Kenny had bothered him to look now. It was beautiful.

“Is it like this every morning?” He asked, and Kenny shook his head slowly.

“Nah, this is a good one. It’s in my damn eyes so I hate it, but I know it looks nice anyway.”

Craig hummed his affirmation, and he crossed his arms over the lip of the crate to rest his chin over them. It reminded him of looking out the back window of the car as a child; the way he and Tricia made contests of who could look out the longest before Mom or Dad caught one of them without a seatbelt. The tops of the clouds were dyed purple. They traveled slowly above, and in a way he found quite stupid, he liked to think they kept them company on the lonely road the way other human beings could not.

“We’re gonna be there soon, so get yourself all tucked in now.” Kenny said, and Craig took in the brilliant blue of the sky, now fully lit up for the day and blessing the grasses with sunbursts in the blades. He pulled the tarp over himself, and he waited. It smelled faintly of mold.

When the truck finally started to slow down, he found a good crack in his crate that allowed him to spy on the outside. They were rolling up to the compound, which had high fencing and hazardous wooden planks boarding up the flat area between two dirt mounds that disguised the rest. There were two men at the gate with firearms, and Craig felt uneasy at the sight of their extended barrels pointed at the dirt, idle in their arms.

“Mornin’, McCormick,” one of them said somewhat cheerfully in that it wasn’t a complete monotone, and Kenny responded in kind. Another person took a heavy step onto the truck and tore open the tethered cloth that covered the back of it, surprising Craig and paralyzing his lungs.

“How you gonna fit your shipment in here, bud? You got it half-full already.” The guy chuckled and it echoed along the makeshift walls of the truck, and Kenny must have distracted him enough, because the foot that had made the truck sink with its weight was lifted, and the carriage bounced back to normal. Craig felt nauseous from the movements, and he hoped sincerely it’d be over soon. A few more minutes of small talk between the men and the truck was back to rolling slowly over the dirt, and he took up his position at the crack in his crate to watch what he could with what little visibility he had.

Kenny pulled into a small lot right beside an opening into the woods and turned the key over to shut the noisy beast off. The hush was much appreciated on Craig’s sore ears. The truck shook when Kenny hopped from the driver’s seat, and it shook again when he pulled himself up into the body of it. “We got a nice corner seat, so you’ll be able to stealth yourself outta here in a few.” He murmured while he busied himself rearranging the boxes around Craig. “I gotta pick up the slips and shit but I’ll get back to ya. Just sit tight for now, yeah?” He jumped back off the truck, and Craig was left alone with nothing but the low hum of conversation and the tweeting of birds in the trees. He felt curious enough to be brave, and he pulled the canvas away just slightly so he could peek one eye out more clearly at the compound.

There were several other trucks, from what he assumed were several other small towns, parked in similar lots. People around them chatted with one another, and he could hear small bursts of genial chuckling every once in a while from some of them. The atmosphere was friendly among the trucks, but he had a feeling it shifted to something solemn and automated as soon as the drivers began their rounds.

Stations were set up along one side of the open dome like a buffet line, with people behind rickety tables waiting with large crates of foods and other general supplies stacked beside them. Craig watched one man approach them and hand over slips in exchange for two crates of potatoes, then pass them along to an assistant before moving over one space to the next station. It felt like a lunch line, in a sense, but the happy and polite mood that surrounded the trucks was left behind in an almost perfect line straight across the compound, where everything became strictly business. It was vaguely disconcerting.

Craig spent an unfortunate amount of time stuck alone in the crate, the insides heating up very quickly without the whistling of wind to air it out. He tried not to think about how much he needed to pee, and instead tried eavesdropping on the truck drivers in the next plot over.

“We got all the corn?” A rough but feminine voice inquired, and there was the sound of wood scraping wood as their truck was loaded.

“God I hope so, God knows we don’t need anymore. Why all the goddamn corn?” Craig grimaced; apparently South Park was not the only town struggling to embrace the overabundance of corn in their diets. At least the mice would take up a large portion of it, for now. No one ever took the cans anyway.

“Take what we can get, I guess,” the feminine voice answered, and the deeper tone grunted. The voices quieted in favor of the thudding and rumbling of the crates they were presumably arranging, and Craig sighed, leaning back and attempting to relieve some of the pressure on his bony ass. He doubted fat would have helped much, though, as sitting on a completely flat surface with an additional very high risk for splinters was rarely comfortable. He allowed himself to drift off into more unsatisfying sleep. He was going to need a very long night of rest after all of this.

He was startled back into alertness by the ripping away of his tarp. “Quit napping,” Kenny hissed. “You’re startin’ to snore, dumbass.” Kenny’s voice was starting to give him a headache and he glared up at him, realizing it was probably approaching noon given the location of the blinding sun.

“I got in touch with the guy. He’s sent down some intern. Should be trustworthy.” Craig nodded and stood after checking that the truck had been fully covered. “Hop out the side and I’ll send him in your direction. Stay close but keep in the woods. I got some more organizing to do, so I’ll see ya on the flipside.” Kenny saluted him and jumped off the truck, whistling a tune Craig didn’t recognize. He stepped carefully over the edge of the crate as quiet as he could manage, as the walls were certainly not soundproof and the last thing he needed was a swarm of people coming to beat him out like a foraging raccoon.

He took the chance to go a bit further to take the piss he’d been holding for what felt like days, then settled beside a large and dying tree. A boy was stumbling in after him who looked no more than 20, which made Craig feel entirely too old if a 20 year old looked so young to him. He looked skittish and mousy with his brown hair and tan t-shirt, and his jittering was awfully familiar.

“Hey,” the kid whispered harshly, eyes wide with obvious nerves. “Are you the South Park guy?”

“That would be me,” Craig replied, resisting the urge to roll his eyes at the title. He’d rather not be called ‘the South Park guy.’

“I’m just here to take the research. We’ll have your stuff next week.” He came to a halt about ten feet away, and Craig was annoyed he had to lean in so much to hear the kid.

“What exactly is the trade?” Craig asked, half expecting the kid to have no idea. Kenny _had_ said he was an intern.

“My boss says we’ll give you stuff if you hand over all your research. Leave the author space blank.”

It took a moment for the demand to sink in. “You mean strike my name out of the reports.” Craig narrowed his eyes. “Why.”

“We weren’t going to help you at all.” The kid stood taller, filled with a sudden boost of self-confidence, which came at an inconvenient time. It’d be harder to negotiate with his head inflated. “The only reason we’re giving you supplies is because our research is in danger of shut down too, and we need some sort of progress to report with to convince them to keep us up and running.”

“So your plan was to steal my work and use that to keep your shitty lab intact?” Anger bubbled in his stomach like acid, and the flames ignited the back of his throat to make his words burn. To relinquish his work was to renounce the hours of dedication and sacrifice he’d given away in his less than desirable conditions at home. It was an act of great disrespect to tear his credit out from under him.

“I get the feeling you don’t have much of a choice in the matter. It’s either you help us out or we both get nothing. If we can’t get the funding, nobody researches anything.” The kid crossed his arms and Craig’s irritation flared dangerously. “You gotta decide if the cure is worth giving up the credit.” His posture relaxed and everything about him softened, then. “You must have somebody you’re fighting for, right? Why else would you be fighting so hard?”

“Not your business,” Craig warned, as his heart dropped to the bottom of his belly full of fear.

“You have to decide if it’s worth saving them.”

Imaginary wings sprouting from a hospital gown flashed silvery and ethereal in his mind. Craig looked to the ground in abject defeat. “Of course it is,” he muttered, and he kicked at a pinecone in the dirt as though it might let out some of his frustrated energy. It didn’t. “You have to promise that you’ll give me the cure, or whatever treatment you may find, or else I’m not giving you shit.”

“Of course,” the kid nodded. “We’ll put that in writing. Of course.” He smiled at him slightly, the negative tension in the air lessening with time. “I want you to find it too, you know. I want you to save whoever you’re thinking of.”

Craig snorted. “How would you know? You don’t know me.”

“Nah, I don’t.” He shrugged. “But I think I get it.” He took the few steps forward with a hand outstretched to shake, which Craig took. “We don’t have a whole lot left to lose, do we?”

“I guess not.” Craig grunted, and released the handshake with a sigh. “So you can get that contract to me next week?”

He nodded. “Yes sir.” His smile grew wider and Craig fought not to return it. At the end of the day, this was still a business meeting, and he was still pissed off that he’d be essentially losing his work.

Craig snuck back onto the truck from the side he came out of and picked up the stack of heavy binders he’d sat beside the entire truck drive. He handed them to the kid all at once, who sagged with the effort of carrying them. They were extremely heavy, and the boy was skinny and rather weak-looking.

“Hey kid, what’s your name?” Craig asked before he could disappear into the truck rodeo. He was mildly curious.

“It’s Will.” He flashed a smile over his shoulder. Craig watched him stumble away, lugging the huge binders by his hips. He seemed like a good kid who got tangled up in a situation he hadn’t expected. Craig could certainly empathize. He crawled back into the truck and waited to head home. He wished he’d brought a book, or something.

“’Course I had to pick a travel partner who couldn’t help me with the work,” Kenny grumbled as he closed up the back of the truck, and Craig shrugged from the far end of it.

He spent the trip back home in silence, his thoughts occupied by organizing just how he was going to continue his work. It wasn’t entirely clear the amount of aid he’d be receiving, and so he tried to flesh out just what he was capable of without the fancy machinery of the hospital. It didn’t amount to much, really, but he knew he had to try, and he’d gotten himself so far into such a mess it didn’t make sense to bail. Even so, his stomach felt uneasy at the prospect of working for something he wasn’t even sure existed. He wanted to believe in a cure so desperately that he’d keep trying no matter the odds. Tweek was relying on him, whether he knew it or not.

They reached the guards at the South Park gates when the sun began to set, and the clouds, dyed orange this time, marched back through the fences with them. Craig slipped out of the truck before the citizens of the town showed up for their rations, and he went to bed early knowing it’d be the longest night’s sleep he’d be getting for a very long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phew, this was a lot of world-building. I hope you enjoyed it despite how much new information got packed into it! Leave me a comment (if you have the time) if you've got any feedback, please. Last but not least, thank you, as always, for reading!


	6. VI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Craig is stuck, and the pressures of time constraints and demands from his neighboring suppliers isn't helping. He's developing a routine, but he fears failure as a very real possibility. The comfort Tweek brings is enough to ground him, but not enough to help his progress. With a push from the sidelines from Kenny, though, he discovers that he may be able to find help in another questionably qualified recruit.

The house Craig had hijacked for his research had been left in an almost perfect stasis when it was abandoned. The furniture was all still present, but so was the clutter, and the family portraits left dusty on the shelves and the walls made him uneasy. Whoever had owned the property had never come home, and he didn’t want to dwell on whether it was because they’d shuffled inward like the other surviving families or had passed away like the rest of the town. In a way, dying wouldn’t have been such a bad option; at least they’d have died together. Craig didn’t like to think about how Kenny felt with his entire family in the dirt.

The bread he was gnawing at was crumbling all over the ground and he had half a mind to sweep it up before remembering the ants had always been there and there really wasn’t a point. The insects were gathering in little clumps at his feet but he didn’t mind them, and he watched them carry tiny pieces of the bread on their backs to their anthill somewhere nearby. Ants had always fascinated him. His mother would throw a fit, seeing this many ants on a hardwood floor. He smiled at the notion; he missed her and the rest of his family. He’d have to go home again soon. As soon as he finished what he’d brought to eat, he trudged back down the stairs to ignore the rest of the daylight and work late into the night.

The days were growing longer and hotter, and he was starting to get used to hosing himself down in the sinks at work after spending the night in a musty old bed with no air circulation. He tried to go home as often as he could, which wasn’t very often. He fell asleep at his desk a lot, situated in the dark basement of his ugly improvised lab, and he hated how much wax in the candle it wasted when he did, for not only medical supplies were scarce.

The lab mice’s chatter had quieted down as time went on if only because Craig was hardly able to take care of them properly, and the casualties sustained by his experimentation were not being replenished. It had been a loophole he’d severely overlooked when he took them in the first place. He feared incest may throw off the data too much, and so he didn’t breed them, and the mice that died of complications simply knocked his numbers down by one with nothing to replace them with. He was struggling more with the guilt of their dying lately, like when he’d first taken up the research and had to learn to let go of the gravity of it. At the very least, Kenny was complaining less about him taking all the canned corn. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do once he lost them all, though his injections hadn’t killed anyone in days, which was promising, he thought.

He’d been scribbling his notes furiously into old scrap paper and bad copies, striking through the information that had been recycled because fresh paper wasn’t something he’d be able to find, and especially not lab books. He made do with what he had, and it resulted in very sloppy-looking penmanship with imaginary margins and lines, but data nonetheless. It was shocking, comparing what he had in his shoddy basement to what was at the hospital.

When Craig returned with Kenny the week after his first meeting with Will, Will had minimalistic equipment ready for him to take in crates. The kid smiled too much, Craig decided, but it also could have been that he scowled too much. A contract like he’d been promised was waiting in his hands to sign, and Craig read over it three times before feeling somewhat okay with signing it. The agreement was as simple as Will had described: we’ll supply you to continue your research and you’ll hand over anything you put down on any scrap of paper, for us to steal and take credit for. It was frustrating to say the least, but necessary, because without their help he wouldn’t even have a power supply. They’d given him a decently sized generator that clunked a lot and shook like crazy every hour or so, but at least it worked and recharged via the sun.

Though Kenny provided the transportation and the initial connections to the neighboring hospital, he had no other business with Craig or his research, and so he kept out of his hair. Craig wasn’t complaining, per say, but working in constant solitude was becoming taxing on his psyche. “Find something new?” he’d ask on the drive to the compound, and Craig would have a mediocre response that typically amounted to a complicated way to say ‘no.’ That was the extent of it, really.

“Your folders are shrinking,” Will had commented with a frown, inspecting Craig’s work by flipping through it quickly.

“I’m working on it,” Craig had bitten back, and that had been the end of their exchange. That had been two days ago, and he was already running even further behind the batch Will had complained about. There was something in the puzzle that Craig was just _missing_ , and it was times like these that he sorely missed the scientific community and its sense of collaboration.

As it stood, he could get the cells on plates to reject the cytomegalovirus, but somewhere between treating the cells and treating the mice, the trail went cold. His attempts at injecting the same or similar serum into the mice’s bodies were massive failures, and though the deaths had reduced as he’d tweaked the formula, they hadn’t developed an immunity or done much of anything different either. He’d gone from one issue to another without going an inch forward. It made him want to tear his hair out, most days.

He was running out of time, and mice. Tweek was stable under the constant watch of the hospital, but Craig feared how long that would last. They didn’t have much of an idea of how long the brain could sustain attacks, even when kept in ideal conditions like Tweek was. It made his searching even more desperate, and his determination even stronger. It made his stomach sick. Craig clenched his fist over his torso while his insides writhed, and he sat staring at the steadily burning candle on his desk until the primal urges of fear and pain passed over him and were replaced with exhaustion. He looked to his watch and counted how many hours he had until sunrise and therefore work (three), and he ambled up the staircase to the old bed he’d come to accept as his second home.

Perhaps it was a third, though, he thought as he drifted off, because his first home was not where he grew up but in a heart beating steadily several blocks down, in a room with a record player and an angel with silver wings.

 

* * *

 

It was a good health day.

“Craig,” Tweek greeted, and he held his arms out and grabbed at the air with his hands impatiently. Craig breathed a laugh through his nose and crossed the hospital room, but not to Tweek’s bed, which lay messy and abandoned and probably cold under the ceiling fan. It was a good health day, Craig could tell, because Tweek was painting again. He crouched down and folded his legs in a pretzel with a low groan at the aching in his joints, and Tweek snorted at him, calling him an old man, before he leaned over to hug him from their place on the ground. They sat on Tweek’s tarp, which was really just an old bed sheet covered in old dried paints that he laid down whenever the inspiration struck. Craig exhaled slowly to let the tension out of his shoulders, and he leaned back on his palms to look up at what progress he’d missed so far.

Tweek had a beautiful understanding of color. Craig would always say that it was his strongest suit, when it came to painting. He brought out the most vibrant hues, which stood out so greatly against the plain white of the hospital walls. If the ward was a desert, Tweek’s room was an oasis of brilliant color theory, a warm wash of life that felt like it breathed alongside them. It was never overpowering, but it was enough that when the sunlight illuminated the wall Tweek had dedicated to his scrawlings, it glowed with its own energy that Craig sometimes feared had been entirely lost to the world after the pandemic. He only found that energy in two places now: Tweek’s art on the hospital walls, and Helen’s aching fingers that would sometimes play an invisible piano on countertops, tables, and her own thighs.

Tweek had a tree growing toward the ceiling now, one with dark brown branches highlighted with purple and blue, and he was painting every leaf and flower a different color. The one he worked at now was yellow, with specks of orange that he was pressing into the wall with his smallest brush in little pinpricks. “Did you get bored of the fish?” Craig asked, looking to the remnants of the ocean scenery he’d had in the same place before he washed over it with more sloppy white paint.

Tweek bit his lip as he swirled his brush in a spiral, and he didn’t take his eyes off his wall while he spoke. “I missed spring,” he said, and Craig nodded. It made all the sense in the world. He missed spring too, and not just the weather. Craig had a suspicion Tweek felt the same.

“Your rose bushes still look okay,” Craig muttered, and Tweek did finally look at him then, his brush pausing a few inches from the wall. His face had a peculiar sort of hope to it; it looked happy, but lost. “I think they’ll probably bloom later this year.”

“You think?” Tweek said quietly, and Craig nodded with an affirmative hum. Tweek’s brush quivered in his hold and he relaxed it, letting the long handle rest against his smaller fingers and dip downward. There was only enough paint left on his brush’s bristles to stain them orange, and Tweek tested it on the back of his hand to confirm it was dried. When it came back mostly clear he sighed and took the same position as Craig with the paintbrush caught between his knuckles, idle but ready to be dipped in something new. “What am I missing from in here?” Tweek asked, his voice solemn and low, and Craig looked at his art with new eyes. He thought it might be a sad tree, now.

“Nothing at all,” Craig said, but they both knew it wasn’t true. Tweek didn’t know that what he was missing was actually a high-stakes chase to a cure that Craig risked his livelihood for regularly, but what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. His research was flatlining and he was reaching deadlines for data he simply didn’t have, and it made him impossibly on edge. Tweek had enough to worry about, though, and so he remained silent.

“I doubt it,” Tweek murmured, but Craig didn’t answer, because he didn’t like to lie to his husband. He instead placed his hand on top of Tweek’s, displacing his paintbrush in favor of his fingers, and relished in the feeling of Tweek’s warm skin. “It doesn’t feel alive yet,” Tweek complained.

“It doesn’t?” Tweek shook his head. “Anything I can do?” Though the question was silly, he asked it. Tweek tapped a finger to his chin, deep in thought. Then it was like a light bulb above his head, because his eyes lit up and before Craig could properly protest, Tweek was slathering bright yellow paint all over his right hand. “What’re you-” but Tweek made a loud squelching sound under his palm as he smacked it right in the middle of the tree’s trunk, before Craig could ask. He shifted his hand’s pressure around to spread the paint from all the nooks into the wall, before he carefully peeled it away to admire his canary yellow handprint. Excess paint globbed in the outline of his fingers, and he squeezed them together on his actual hand to let the paint squish between his joints. He shook in a silent giggle, and the smile on his face was infectious. He looked up into Craig’s eyes, the green of them blinding.

“Okay, now you.”

“Now me?”

Tweek nodded at him, his smile growing wider, and Craig took a moment to study his hand before outstretching it to rest in Tweek’s lap. Tweek grabbed his darkest blue and began covering Craig’s hand in the paint. He shivered at the slight cold. “Okay, stick it right over- yeah, you got it. Remember doing this in elementary school?” Tweek asked, running a hand over Craig’s arm while he pressed it slowly into the wall so that his handprint and Tweek’s could touch. Shivers shot down his spine at the gentle grazing of fingernails over his goosebumps.

“If you keep that up I’m gonna smudge it because you’re tickling me,” Craig mumbled. Tweek laughed at him. “I remember. Our hands were the leaves, though.”

“Yeah, and I think that meant something then.” Tweek pressed gently at the center of Craig’s hand to push it all the way into the wall, before helping him pull it away and leave a perfect imprint. The paints were wet enough to have mixed slightly into a subtle green where their thumbs touched. “This means something different, now.”

Craig nodded like it made sense, because even though it didn’t to him, he knew it did to Tweek, and that was what mattered. Tweek leaned against him, his invisible stubble poking into Craig’s neck, and he helped wipe Craig’s hand clean on the tarp. Craig planted a kiss right at the center of his mess of golden hair, which Tweek hummed at in appreciation. “I’m running out of magenta.”

“Are you?”

“Mhmm.”

“Alright.”

They watched the sun go down; not directly, but by the way the colors changed from warm to cool on his massive canvas. Tweek explained that he wanted to do more leaves tomorrow but that he didn’t like painting and drawing at night, which Craig already knew. Sometimes his art helped him to forget that he was forgetting. Craig helped it along further by not saying much in substance, to avoid a trigger. When Tweek had his brushes in his hand, he felt almost back to normal, and Craig could almost forget the hospital gown and how loosely it hung around his shoulders nowadays. He hadn’t even been much of an artist before the pandemic, not really, but something about it brought Tweek comfort that not much else had. Even Craig could not compete, because there were times he hurt Tweek very much simply by reminding him of himself. The paints didn’t do that, and they were thus his closest ally. Craig didn’t mind.

He overstayed his welcome, playing a handful of records while Tweek drifted off to sleep tucked safely in bed. He refused to leave until his eyes closed and his breathing evened, and even after it did, he took a few extra minutes to stare. He’d already memorized the way he looked while he dreamt, but it was nice to renew the imagery, and thank the universe for the honor of existing on the same plane as him. Craig reminded himself of how beautiful his husband was, even when he was doing absolutely nothing remarkable at all. His heart swelled as he brushed aside his hair and pressed a kiss to his forehead. He walked slowly, regretfully away from his bedside, something he wished he never had to do for it felt so painful, like the slow pulling of tape from skin. It stung.

“One day,” he whispered, to Tweek but mostly himself, “I’ll let you paint all over the walls of our house. I never let you before, but,” he chuckled, “I should have.

“I’m bad at this, you know. I never got any better at it. I can’t talk about this to you while you’re awake.” Craig shifted on his feet in the doorway, and he heard the gentle inhale of a sleepy breath from across the room.

He paused. There were a million things he wanted to say, wrapped up in tight coils waiting to be unsprung deep in his brain, but he was without the words to express them. In the end, all he could think of to say before closing the door behind him was, “I love you.”

He hoped it would be enough, just for tonight.

 

* * *

 

Mud was starting to show itself more after a handful of warmer days had diminished the supply of snow in favor of brown slush. It was only March, so no one had gotten their hopes up about spring quite yet, but the warmth had been a nice change of pace when they’d been plagued by sunlight that provided all the light but none of the heat. Sunny days with bitter cold temperatures were teases, Clyde had said that morning, and Craig remembered that as he crunched through the old snow turned icy from the renewed frost.

Spending the night with Tweek had delegated his evening to a solid day off, which he probably needed if he spent the time to slow down and listen to how his body ached. He was going to work himself sick, most likely, like back when college was getting serious and his reports frequently kept him up all night. The day off meant he was going to spend the evening with his family for once, who would not quit nagging him about taking breaks once in a while to spend time with them and catch his breath. They didn’t understand, though, not really. There was a specific weight that came with the backwards experiments he conducted, and it meant there was no time for breaks.

The sunlight had already vanished while with Tweek, and once more he was left with only his flashlight to guide him home. It was starting to get weaker, and he planned on leaving it out in the sun for a day or two to try to recharge it. All he needed was something to keep him from tripping on old junk frozen in the snow, so he didn’t exactly need high beams. He missed when batteries were a constant though, always stocked on a shelf at Wal-mart or the nearest corner store.

“Hey,” a voice said, startling Craig from his headspace and making him stumble forward in a few clumsy steps.

“What the-”

“Shh!” The voice hushed him, and Craig stood still, crouched in a defensive stance. “I want in.”

Craig whipped his flashlight toward the random house he was next to, and on the front steps sat an older teenager with jet black hair who looked vaguely familiar. Craig jumped when it dawned on him. “What the fuck? Ike Broflovski? What are you talking about?”

“I said I want in,” Ike said. He stood and started walking toward Craig, who resisted the urge to back away from him. “I have your binder. I can help you.” He spoke in short, confident fragments that made Craig’s head spin.

“My binder? What binder? What are you talking about?”

Ike smiled for the first time, and it was strangely wry and boyish. He was reminded that Ike was probably only just now hitting eighteen. “Your data. You were sending it to Denver for a second opinion, judging from the cover letter. I stole it.”

Craig had to go back in memory to connect the dots. “The first binder I sent them?” Ike nodded. “The fuck were you doing with that?” Craig growled. “If that had gone through, I might not have been shut down in the first place!” His hand free of the flashlight twitched, itching to crash into Ike’s smirking jaw. At his anger, though, Ike’s smile dropped, and some of the confidence leaked from him.

“Um, I know that. Sorry.” He hunched his shoulders in shame. Ike had turned out to be oddly tall, and interacting with someone of equal height to his own towering six-foot-two was always a little bizarre. Craig hadn’t seen the kid in years, even before the outbreak.

“How do you know?” he asked carefully. Maybe his underground research was not as discreet as he thought, which made his heart flutter with anxiety.

“Kenny told me. I’m smart. I can help.”

Craig took a moment to let his strange sentences sink in before he shook his head, laughing humorlessly. “Oh, fuck no. I’m not letting a fucking kid in on my sick fantasy of an adventure. Tell Kenny to fuck himself.”

“But I know what I’m doing!” Ike grew frustrated and looked like he might stomp his foot in a toddler-like rage any minute. “I’m a certified genius. Give me the data and I can work on the hours you need to sleep. I’ve already thought this through.”

“I don’t get it,” Craig said, trying to catch up. “How did you end up stealing my binder? That was months ago.”

Ike sighed. “Does it matter?” Craig was silent, to prove his point that it did, in fact, matter very much. “Look, I’m too young to have gotten a degree before this hit, and nobody will let me do anything without some sort of credibility. Which is _such_ bullshit, by the way. Isn’t Clyde Donovan working in the lab now too? Isn’t he a weatherman?”

“Meteorologist,” Craig quickly corrected, though he wasn’t sure why he’d come to Clyde’s defense so easily. He blamed muscle memory.

“Whatever,” Ike waved him off with an angrily flapping hand. “I wanted to see if I could make sense of your notes and maybe do my own research. I just didn’t have access to the hospital like you do, so I couldn’t. You’ve been going about this _way_ wrong, dude.”

The idea of a kid who should be freshly out of high school deeming his work inadequate made his body tense with irritation. “How would _you_ know?”

Ike shrugged. “Read your paper. Read a lot of biology and chemistry textbooks. You’ve been trying to make a recombinant vaccine when that clearly isn’t working. You have to try something _much_ simpler. I can talk this over with you in the lab. Let’s go.” He hopped down the handful of steps separating the house’s front door pathway from the sidewalk.

“No.” Craig watched Ike’s face drop into a confused frown.

“Why?” He asked.

“This is risky. I’m not willing to take on a kid. I’m not a babysitter.” Craig crossed his arms. Ike basically pouted.

“I’m eighteen now. You don’t have to babysit.” Ike rubbed at his forehead with a grimace, like he was fighting a headache. “You’re not gonna get anywhere if you keep doing this all by yourself. You need help. Let me help you. Come on, Craig.” His demeanor grew softer then, his eyes suddenly far away and tired. “You’re not the only one seeking revenge.”

Craig felt anger spring from the pit of his stomach. “I’m not seeking revenge. He’s not fucking dead. I’m going to save him, and I’m not putting a _kid_ in danger for my own stupid fantasies. No matter how impossible it is.”

“See, you keep saying that,” Ike continued, his voice still much too intentionally soothing, “but I don’t think you believe it. You must have a lot of hope, if you’re working this hard. You don’t think it’s impossible.” Some of his first smile returned, some of his confidence recovered. “It is impossible the way you’re going about it, though, so just let me try. I mean, I already know about the lab. The secret’s already out. It doesn’t really matter if you take me there or not.”

Craig took a moment to think, and Ike was surprisingly patient. If he was being truthful, the idea sounded most appealing because it would mean he wouldn’t be alone all the time. He’d become somewhat starved of social interaction, even if he took the occasional day off. If Ike really didn’t know what he was talking about, there were plenty of amateur things that Craig needed done that could be helped by the equivalent of an intern-slave. “Alright,” he relented, and Ike’s smile grew even wider. “We go by my rules though, and you don’t do shit without my permission. This is my project and I’m not letting you sabotage it. Got it?”

“Oh yeah, definitely.” Ike nodded with an exaggerated head bob. “I think the two of us working together will definitely allow for better progress.” His confidence was a bit infectious, and so he felt inclined to agree.

Craig wasn’t particularly happy about who had become his company, but he was pleased with the addition of knowledge Ike may or may not have. He still had questions, and Ike probably did too, but for now they walked to Craig’s lab in silence. He regretted not going home to his family again like he’d planned. He hoped they’d forgive him.

“And still tell McCormick to go fuck himself,” he added, several blocks later. Ike snickered, and Craig smiled, just a bit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The gang is (basically) all here! Let me know what you thought if you've got the time. :)


	7. VII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ike's educated suggestions mean big changes to Craig's research that he struggles to come to terms with. Meanwhile, with a new member of the team acquainting himself with the lab, Craig is given the chance to focus on life outside of research again, if only briefly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for your continued support! Nothing much to add, so just enjoy!

“This is a lot more than I thought you’d have,” Ike said as he leafed through Craig’s binders quickly, “but you’re gonna have to toss a _lot_ of it.” He didn’t sound horribly remorseful. Craig bristled, tensing.

“Why?” he asked, grating his teeth in an effort not to sound too dismissive, but it still came off aggressive and stiff. Ike didn’t seem to care either way, and he snapped the binder he was holding closed with a loud clap and reached for the next one.

“You’ve been trying the same thing over and over. It’s not working. It sucks but sometimes you have to scrap it all and start over.” Ike nibbled on his lower lip and creased his brow in concentration. “But you said they’re not dying now?”

“Not as much,” Craig admitted, “but they’re not improving either.”

Ike hummed in response and continued reading. He had to wonder if he was actually looking at the pages of messy notes or not, for how fast he was flying through them. He’d gone through the majority of them in less than an hour, asking him questions here and there but not many. Craig sat in his chair turned away from his desk, belly tingling with the nerves that could only remind him of old school projects, watching his teachers grade his work and waiting for their approval or otherwise. Though he’d gone through the process repeatedly throughout his school career, including college, he was reminded most of elementary school now, feeling small and doubtful of himself while his teachers grunted and swiped their red pens. He thought it might have to do with the fact that he was collaborating with Ike Broflovski, little brother of a classmate he hadn’t seen in years with a permanent mental time stamp at age ten.

“How’s your family?” Craig asked, though he regretted it for the sharp look Ike shot at him from his place on the edge of the table.

“The remaining parts are fine,” he snapped, and Craig left it at that. It felt wrong that he couldn’t recall who had lived and who hadn’t from the Broflovski household. He and Tweek hadn’t been there for the first wave, though, and it’d probably happened then. At least it didn’t sound like he was alone; an image of Kenny on the back of his truck with his sad eyes and aging smile flashed across his mind.

“So,” Ike announced, closing the last binder with a thunderous snap, “you’ve been trying the glycoprotein B. It’s a good thought, but it isn’t working. If you’d had contact with Denver you would’ve gotten the suggestion to start over ages ago.” He winced. “I’m sorry about that.”

Craig gave him a curt nod to show that while he was acknowledging the apology, he wasn’t forgiven, and Ike seemed to understand that by the pallor of his face and nervous lick of his lips.

“Right. So you’ve been trying to build on glycoprotein B, which is a decent thought and in theory should work, but your problem is you’re treating this like it’s CMV, which it’s not,” Ike explained. “It’s a _mutated_ form of CMV.”

“I know that,” Craig interjected, “but--”

“The mutation changed the makeup too much for the old vaccine attempts to make any more progress,” Ike spoke over him. “It’s an honest mistake to have made, so don’t beat yourself up.” His arrogance was infuriating, the tone of his voice condescending. He wasn’t sure if it was his intelligence having gone to his head, his late adolescent ego, or both. All Craig knew was that his fist was itching to implant itself in his face, and he had to control his frustration with great effort.

“I know it makes sense to build on something that already made it through a few levels, but the virus isn’t going to react the same way now. So we gotta throw... all this out.” Ike gestured at Craig’s binders, stacked almost as high as he was while he sat next to them on the tabletop. Craig cringed at the thought. He understood that Ike probably had a point, but it had been so much _work._ He wondered if, had he not had such an emotional investment in the research, it would have been less difficult to comprehend the need to discard and refresh.

“So where do we start over then?” Craig asked, running a hand through his hair to scratch at his scalp and soothe his shaking fingers. He couldn’t be certain if he was shaking from his ill-contained anger, the cold from the less than stellar heating, or the anxiety that was slowly filling up his chest at the realization that he’d been led so astray. It didn’t make sense, though; Simmons had strongly encouraged him to try tweaking the pre-existing attempted vaccine, even when he vocalized his doubt in its progress. He had to assume Simmons had just as little information from Denver as he had, despite being his supervisor. South Park was dreadfully in the dark, a side effect of their location nestled in the mountains with the nearest cities hours away.

“You’ve got the virus on hand, right?”

Craig nodded.

“We can start by figuring out what it likes and dislikes. How much of that have you done?”

“Not much,” Craig admitted. “I was following my boss’s guidelines most of the way, until I had to take it on solo.”

“It’s okay. It’ll set us back, but not a big deal. I just wanna see how it reacts to some other vaccines. Think we can get access to those?” Ike hopped from the table, stretching out his legs and rubbing his hands together for warmth.

“I can ask Will,” Craig said, standing from his own chair.

“Who’s Will?”

“The kid who brings me shit at the compound.”

“Oh sweet, there’s a compound?” Ike’s eyes lit up with hopeful excitement. “Can I come see it?”

Craig snorted. “Fucking no. You’ll get in the way.”

“Aww, come on dude,” Ike complained, “I’ll go to help Kenny and just kinda like, be there. I won’t get in the way! I just wanna see it. I’ve been stuck in this goddamn town for over a year.” His shoulders started to sag, the curiosity in his eyes fading in favor of disappointment. He reminded Craig so much of his sister, begging him to take her to the mall to meet her friends so many years ago. He sighed. Ike leaned forward, waiting on his pause.

“...Ask Kenny.”

“Shit, yes!” Ike laughed a bit while he punched the air in victory. Craig didn’t join him. He was still going over all the information Ike had just dumped on him, and gazing at the binders he didn’t need. Ike followed his eyes and sobered up, stepping to the side so Craig could get to them.

He shuffled forward, slowly, to stare straight down at them on the table. They stared back, the top binder with dates for the past month- his most useless research yet, apparently. He picked it up, felt the weight of its paper and cardboard in his hands, the energy he poured into it weighing it down fifty pounds heavier.

Craig didn’t move at first, the gravity of his actions freezing him in place. Then, with a grimace, he dropped the binder on top of the rest and grabbed them all messily. He crossed the room to his garbage can in quick, angry strides, and with a shove he threw them from against his chest inside. The clattering and banging noises of them falling to the bottom echoed in his ears.

“I’m sorry, dude. We’ll get there again,” Ike said after a few moments of respectful silence, and Craig nodded, his fists clenched and his heart pounding.

 

* * *

 

“Y’know, outta everything, I hate this part the most,” Clyde said, a nervous laugh tumbling from the end of his sentence.

Craig breathed an affirmative, but said nothing. Clyde’s voice had been grating on him all morning; he’d chosen today to be more talkative than usual. More often than not, Craig wished he’d leave him alone. He’d moved past high school the day after graduation, personally, but Clyde seemed intent to rekindle an old friendship. Craig just wanted to work the day and go home. He wished he’d let it go, but he’d always been so stubbornly _invested._

“I mean, not really, but,” Clyde tacked onto the end, but his trailing off garnered no further response, and the slight awkward tension Craig had grown to tolerate hung in the air between them.

They walked side by side to the phlebotomist’s wing, their footsteps echoing amongst several others in a disorganized, spread apart line. It was nearing twelve on the fourteenth, which was both Craig and Clyde’s assigned donation day. His blood type was B+, and he’d been told once it supplied approximately thirty patients in the hospital. Clyde picked on him for the irony, which Craig vehemently rejected. He wasn’t a negative person. He just wasn’t an especially positive one either.

“How’s the family?” It was all anyone ever asked about, _the family,_ and Craig was tired of the small talk, because he’d hated it before but he hated it even more now that the only topic up for discussion was the health of their relatives. Clyde asked this as they turned the corner into the prepped rooms, each table and chair occupied by an exhausted nurse. No one looked well-rested anymore.

“They’re good,” Craig replied dutifully, but truthfully he wasn’t fully aware of how they were. He missed them. He wondered how Helen was doing, if his mother’s classroom was still full, if his father was still getting business as an electrician in a largely blacked out town.

“That’s good,” Clyde replied genially, and they took seats directly beside each other. Craig looked away and winced when the nurse pressed the needle into his arm, because despite how much he used them in his everyday work, a needle used on himself could still make him queasy. “What’s Tricia up to?”

Clyde liked to ask about her. He probably missed his own sister. “I think she’s been writing more,” he replied distantly. “She likes writing stories for Helen.”

“Oh, how’s she been?”

“She’s good,” Craig said, and for the first time, a small smile cracked his lips. “She’s better.”

Clyde, forever pleased with each positive reaction, beamed back at him. “That’s awesome, dude. She’s lucky to have you guys.”

His grin felt too bright to look at directly and so Craig averted his gaze, never sure how to take such a compliment. He mumbled a thank you, out of politeness, and Clyde’s smile never wavered.

They spent the rest of their draws in a rare comfortable silence. Clyde hummed an old pop song Craig swore he knew, but couldn’t recall the lyrics for. In that moment, while watching Clyde kick his foot to the beat of his own song, Craig felt like the biggest asshole in the world for having shoved him at such a distance. He’d done him no wrong, none at all, and if he’d learned anything about life in the months past, it was that friends were either dead or hard to come by. A sinking feeling weighed his stomach down, and he had half a mind to apologize.

They never did apologies, though, even as kids, and so at the end of the night, hours after they left the draw site in tandem, he said, “Have a good night,” for what could very well be the first time since they started working together. Clyde’s resulting smile could light up a room.

“See ya tomorrow, bro,” he replied, the smile audible even, and Craig watched him walk down the other side of the road with an extra spring in his step. He thought in that moment that not only were friends hard to come by, but friends like Clyde were one in a million, and he’d be a goddamn idiot to let a ray of sunshine like him pass him by. He smiled to himself all the way to his lab, where several lifetimes of stress and emotional burdens didn’t feel quite so bad.

 

* * *

 

Tweek had yelled at him to go home.

_“Your mother called_ me _asking how you were. Me! In case you haven’t-” he paused to shudder “-n-noticed, I’m not exactly mobile. Where the hell are you going?”_

He’d given him a bullshit excuse about working too many hours, which had made Tweek go from irritation to sympathy at the drop of a hat. He regretted making the lie almost instantly.

_“Well, do me a favor and go home for once. They miss you.”_

It was all the convincing he ever needed- when from his husband, anyway.

When he reached his front door he fumbled for his keys, and, to his deep frustration, he realized he’d left them behind in his locker at the lab. The spare wasn’t under the mat. He had to ring the doorbell, which felt so supremely wrong to be doing at his own house. Tricia answered.

“Haven’t seen _you_ in a million years, asswipe,” she grunted, and Craig tussled her hair in response. She called him a few more insults before his mother ducked her head out from the kitchen entrance, and her smile was much too relieved.

“Craig! Where have you been?” she asked, exasperated, and she huffed when he shrugged. “Well, tell us about it at dinner. I trust you’ll stay for dinner this time? Assuming this is still your home?” She had the classic irritated mom voice on, which he resented.

“Yeah, mom. Sorry.” He stepped inside and tugged his shoes off one at a time.

“Woah, where’d you get such new sneakers?” Tricia asked, and he realized he was wearing the nearly pristine pair he’d pawned off a guy at the compound.

“None of your fuckin’ business, kid,” he said in his lightest teasing tone, and his mother swatted at him with the rolled up old newspaper in her hands.

“Craig!” she scolded, and he cringed so subtly he almost got away with it, but Tricia caught it enough to smirk knowingly at him. He flipped her off at his side, for old time’s sake. “Watch that mouth. You’ve spent much too long away from home.”

“Mom, I’ve been an adult for like, five years,” he deadpanned. “I didn’t regress back to a teenager when I moved back in.”

She mumbled something to the effect of “I know,” before she sighed tightly and turned back into the kitchen. “Your father’s on a call. He’ll be home later.” That usually meant after the sun went down. “I’ll put something real together for dinner. Be thankful!” She popped back out to jab a wooden spoon in his direction, and he held his hands up.

“Yeah, thanks mom.” She disappeared again, and he turned back to Tricia, who’d leaned against the stairwell. “Where’s mom 2.0?”

“She’s out back,” Tricia said, jamming a thumb over her shoulder toward the patio, and Craig strode through the living room to the sliding glass doors that led to their backyard. “Hey, wait,” she said, catching him by the shoulder, and the sarcastic comment died in his throat at the seriousness in her expression. “She hasn’t been super great. Just, tread lightly, okay?” Her eyes softened, and he nodded. He regretted that he’d accidentally lied to Clyde.

The door squeaked slightly when he drew it back, and sure enough she sat in one of the white wicker chairs, facing away from the door toward the setting sun. The outer strands of her hair, let down as it often was lately, were disturbed by a slight breeze. Her shoulders were bare, and she looked so very small that way, illuminated by a golden lining traced by the sun’s rays. He felt a shiver rattle his bones, and he thought she must be cold too, perhaps more so with her speckled shoulders exposed where her hair didn’t touch them. He ducked back inside to quickly grab her one of the blankets on the couch, and when he walked back out, he draped it gently around her neck.

She didn’t jump, suggesting she’d noticed him enter her space, but she didn’t speak either, and Craig had to walk around her chair to face her to see the smile of recognition on her face. “Thank you, darling,” she whispered, and he nodded, smiling in kind.

“How’ve you been?” he asked, sitting down on the matching loveseat adjacent to her chair, and he glanced over his shoulder to see the warm oranges and pinks that melted in the sky like sherbet ice cream.

She ignored his question, which was not uncommon but never comfortable, and her gaze cast over Craig’s shoulder too and into the sky, where her eyes glossed over like mirrors.

She stirred, gripping the ends of her blanket and wrapping it around herself like a shawl, and her brow creased. Her eyes remained reflective; Craig couldn’t see any of her soul past them. “I married Richard at this time, you know,” she said, and her lips barely moved as she spoke but the words were clear, cutting through the wind like razorblades.

“Most people do the afternoon, earlier in the day, but-” she breathed what could have been a laugh “-we were strange. Always strange.” Her eyes flickered to Craig’s, gaining clarity in the motion, and they were watery with unshed tears. “He wanted to see the sunset on my skin. He said it was the prettiest thing he’d ever seen. I remember, because he didn’t go on about some silly metaphor after that. There was no metaphor; it just, was.” Her smile pulled her lips taut. It trembled with the effort to keep her cheeks dry. Craig reached out to take her hands in his, but said nothing, because he didn’t dare interrupt her thoughts with his own.

“Craig,” she murmured, and Craig was aggressively reminded of the way Tweek said his name too, “tell me. What did Richard talk to you about, that night?”

Craig looked down at her hands, noting the way they shook, and he squeezed them tighter to help them stop. He knew she meant the night before his marriage ceremony with Tweek, when Richard had requested to pull him aside and chat where no one would overhear. He’d been so terrified then, following him up the staircase to his bedroom. She had asked him this question more times than he could count. He chuckled at the memory fondly, anyway.

“He said that your father had given him the same talk. Told me marriage was a choice and a conscious effort, and I had to be sure I was ready for the commitment. He said he wasn’t always sure himself.”

Helen smiled, her soul softened. “We had some rough patches, in the beginning. Oh, but when Tweek was born, it was like a light switch. Our whole lives changed.” She hummed and closed her eyes, the sunset mottling her eyelids and making the wrinkles in her skin more pronounced. “I don’t think we were very good parents, Craig.”

The statement startled him, so raw in its shame and honesty. He didn’t want to argue, because as much as it pained him to think so, he wasn’t sure that he disagreed. He remembered the nights Tweek spent alone at home, the long days he worked at the shop without pay, and the insecurities he felt in his most vulnerable moments. Tweek didn’t always believe that his parents loved him. Craig felt lucky, in that regard, not to have been in his shoes.

“Thank you for helping him become all he could be,” Helen said, her voice low as a whisper with the intensity of a shout. “Thank you for taking care of my baby for me.”

He wanted to argue, to say that he hadn’t done any of that, but it would be a lie, and so he held his tongue. He let out a long sigh instead, and let go of her hands to give her arm a reassuring rub. “He’s strong,” he insisted, “stronger than me, I think. You saw the bruises, you remember.”

They shared a laugh at the memories, at the schoolyard fights that had marked the beginning of their friendship and eventual courtship. He was relieved to see her smiling again. “You’ve been so strong, for all of us, Craig,” she said warmly. She reached up to take his chin, and she forced them to make eye contact. She looked so intensely at him that he felt a flicker of intimidation in his chest, but she held his chin too tightly for him to easily turn away. “Do not forget yourself. Do you understand?” When he nodded, she relaxed. “I know how hard you’re working. Come home more.” A twinge of guilt hit him, and he winced. Her grip on his chin slipped to cup his cheek, and he leaned into the touch slightly.

“You’re a wonderful son, and a wonderful husband,” she whispered. “I don’t think that you know that about yourself, but you are. Thank you.”

With those words it really did become too much to bear, and his eyes darted away to the door mat while the guilt filled his lungs. He swallowed tightly past the lump in his throat and nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Her smile was oblivious to his struggle, and he squeezed her arm gently before he carefully stepped away and out of view. He watched her watch the sky, watched her memories dance across the clouds and the way gold kissed her outline, and he tried to quell the shame that was blackening his heart like poison. They didn’t move until dinner was announced.

That night, sinking into his bed that felt as though he hadn’t slept in it in years, he stared at the walls where the moonlight filtered in past the blinds. The world was so deadly silent with no car wheels to slash the wet pavement, and the faint slats that he could only barely make out were the only signs of light from outside. As he drifted to sleep, the fabric of his pajamas warming to hug his body, he wondered how close to his lab someone would have to be to hear the generator running. He thought of Ike, who had taken the evening’s shift so that he could come home, and if he’d made any progress on what he said he’d planned to do. His last thought though, as always, was of Tweek, and with a heart enveloped by the beauty of his husband’s freckled cheeks, he gave in to the embrace of sleep with the day’s last smile still curling his lips.


	8. VIII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Craig gets news he's known was coming, but dreaded all the same. It aches. 
> 
> End of Act One.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome back to Halfway! I've made some exciting changes to this story, which includes what you may have noticed to be a second part to the "Halfway series." If you haven't checked it out yet, I've created a story titled Quarter Rests, which is a collection of drabbles and one shots from the same storyline and universe as Halfway. Please take a look if you're interested! I think it provides a nice glimpse into some of the events from the main story that otherwise wouldn't be told.   
> With all that out of the way, I wish you well.

In an unforeseen turn of events, Craig grew rather tolerant of leading a double life. The stress never diminished and the work never ended, but even through the struggle, he was starting to get accustomed to living off three hours of sleep and falling asleep at his desk half the time. Ike was covering for him in the daytime hours under the guise of starting up an internship with Kenny for the truck driving job, and with the lab left unattended for only a few hours per night, progress was moving steadily forward. Ike’s contributions made his research productivity skyrocket, and though Will raised an eyebrow at the new, neater penmanship on half the pages of the regular research delivery, he didn’t ask. Sometimes, it had been agreed upon universally that it was best not to ask. 

Craig zoned out as much as his work would allow while he waited for the results on a sample to print, performing mindless restocking tasks in the meantime. The effortless nature of the hospital’s lab work acted almost as a break to the tiresome work he was doing under the table in his off hours. He daydreamed about taking a nap on his lunch break, as he’d quickly discovered that though he was getting used to three hours of sleep per night, a minute under that would be enough to throw the next day off-kilter. He was presently operating on approximately two and a half; a last-minute amendment had put him past his bedtime. He blinked blearily at the whirring machines repeating their tasks over and over before his eyes.

“Craig?” A voice startled him from his haze, and he blinked rapidly as he connected eyes with Simmons. He looked taller from Craig’s perspective sitting in his desk chair, and when Craig recognized sympathy on the man’s face, he quickly jumped to his feet to meet his height.

“What’s going on?” he asked, because Simmons only got that look on his face when something was wrong. God, he hoped it wasn’t Tweek, ‘ _ please don’t let it be Tweek-’ _

“I’ve got your husband’s ward on the -16 line.” Craig’s breath caught in his throat, and he knew he must have looked terrified, because his boss’s sympathetic upturned brow grew even more piteous.

“Is he okay?” he asked, and Simmons shook his head.

“Not sure,” he replied, and Craig nodded before walking over to the nearest phone. The slow blinking hold light burned into his eyesight, foreboding and intimidating. He cleared his throat, and pressed the button.

“Chemistry department, Craig speaking,” he said. He spoke quickly, urgently.

_ "Hi Craig, it’s Susan,” _ a familiar voice chirped.  _ “How are you?” _

“I’m good. How’re you?” he replied. Phone etiquette autopilot carried him through the numbness in his throat.

_ “Good, thanks! We needed to speak to you about your husband. Is it possible for you to come to the ward to speak to the physician?” _

Dread sunk in his stomach. “Is it not something we can discuss on the phone?”

_ “Well,” _ she began slowly,  _ “there are several things that she wants to go over with you first that would be easier in person.” _

He didn’t know what that implied, but he didn’t like it. “Yeah, I can ask my supervisor. Thanks, Susan.” She gave a generic goodbye, and he hung up the phone, not bothering to return it. The click of the earpiece over the receiver was clunky and hard; he’d pressed plastic into plastic a little more forcefully than he’d intended. When he turned and looked up at his boss, Simmons was already looking back, and looking more sympathetic than before.

“Just keep me updated,” he said, and Craig nodded, relieved that he wouldn’t have to try to explain himself while his throat was closing up. He got up and headed for the locker room, leaving his lab coat draped over his chair to come back to later. It was like making a wish for the conversation to be short and gentle enough to return to work like everything was fine.

Crossing the hospital passed in a blur until he found himself suddenly around the corner from Tweek’s ward. He paused before he turned it, instead pressing his back into the wall to slow his thumping heart and take a few calming breaths.  _ ‘Calm down, nothing is wrong yet,’ _ he told himself, but he didn’t quite believe it. After one last deep breath through his nose with his eyes closed, he let it out through his mouth while he bounced off the wall and rounded the corner, to walk down the pathway that led directly to the front desk.

“Hi Craig,” Susan greeted warmly, and Craig sent her a small appreciative smile that she returned tenfold. “I’ll let Doctor Hammond know you’re here.” He nodded an affirmative, and took a seat at one of the benches nearby. After the last time he’d been summoned by a doctor, he knew better than to walk into Tweek’s door without asking. If something was wrong with him, he didn’t want to worsen it by showing up and potentially triggering a new symptom. The first bloody episode was traumatizing enough.

He didn’t have to wait long before a tall blonde with a binder and an embroidered coat popped out from a neighboring room. “Good morning, Mister Tucker,” she said, in her taut, administrative voice, and he stood to take her extended hand and shake it.

“Please, Craig is fine. I tell you that every time.”

She waved him off, a high pitched chuckle caught in the back of her throat. “I know, but, you know. Formalities.” She gestured towards a consultation office and ushered Craig inside, whisking him into the chair pulled up to the desk and taking a seat behind it. She dropped her binder down while Craig inspected her family photos, each of them in perfect little frames that dotted her desk like a cluttered bookcase. Her children were beautiful. He wondered if they were alive.

“So, Craig. I called you down here to discuss your husband. I know you’re a man of science, and you understand this is not good news.” Her eyes grew focused, hardened in a way that doctors perfected when they had bad news to share. Craig’s chest tightened and he gulped mechanically.

“Is he going to be okay?” he asked, stupidly of course, because he caught the subtle wince she made that her training had tried hard to force out of her. The wires threaded through his torso tightened again, making his next breath wheeze and his heart labor.

“Your husband continues to prove inspirational for how strong he has remained in his uphill battle,” she began, her tone careful yet firm, “but I’m afraid he’s taken a bit of a turn.” She flipped open her binder, apparently Tweek’s chart, and tugged out a few sheets of glossy paper with images of cranial scans on them. She set them side by side in front of Craig and cleared her throat. “This-” she pointed at the image on the left “-is from about two months ago. The images came back relatively normal, with some expected signs of slight atrophy. We took the other one two days ago.”

Craig took a moment to compare the two images, and the differences in their colorful representations of Tweek’s brain. Sometimes he liked to imagine that his brain looked exactly as this, awash with the beautiful blues and reds and yellows that he painted with. He said nothing aloud, choosing instead to internalize what it meant. Doctor Hammond went on, this time in a softer voice. “You can see that there is a noticeable change in activity. His brain is starting to resemble a patient with Alzheimer’s, with decreased activity in the regions related to memory and cognitive function. I’m afraid with such limited knowledge on the effects of CMV Mutation B, I’m not sure how much of this is curable, if any at all.” She shook her head. “We can keep pumping him with fluids and keeping him alive, but his brain is still deteriorating.”

Craig’s eyes refused to leave the two pictures in front of him, switching back and forth between them in time with the ticking of the doctor’s hanging clock. His mind was racing, but without a thought to speak of. It felt like a thousand bees were buzzing in his ears, too loud for his thoughts to become words and sentences to articulate what he was feeling. His chest felt hollow and weak, and his hands felt close to trembling. He tucked them under his legs to keep them in place, turning his knuckles white against the cool metal of his chair. When he finally managed to tear his gaze away from the scans, he met Doctor Hammond’s painfully pitying stare.

“What do you propose we do?” he said, and he hated how weak it sounded, how much his voice came out like a whisper when all he wanted to do was shout. In his heart he was yelling, screaming at the heavens,  _ ‘Why, why!’ _ but he knew they would not answer, as they never had. He licked his lips and found it difficult to swallow past the lump in his throat that made his eyes sting.

“Like I said, we can keep him hydrated and as comfortable as possible,” she said, averting her gaze to anywhere but him, “but we know so little. I’m not sure what more we can do to help, unless a cure were to arrive at our doorstep.”

Oh, how he wished it were possible, and how hard he tried to make it so. If only she knew. “How long can this go on?” he croaked, and the burning in his eyes grew more painful, more difficult to ignore.

“It’s hard to predict that, but if he were to continue at the rate he currently is declining, I would give him another six months or so, before his cognitive function and memory become too damaged to be self-sufficient.”

“And then?” he said, urging her forward. “I can care for him if he can’t do it himself- that’s not an issue.”

“If you’re asking about total brain dysfunction, again, it’s hard to know, but a year is my approximate guess.”

One year.

He had one year, and that was  _ total. _

The clock continued on, ticking endlessly as the only sound between them for a while. Craig was at a loss, and the physician had nothing more to add. She sat in silence across from him while he thought, and for a brief moment, he wondered how many people she’d told that their loved ones were going to die.

“Can I still see him?” he asked, his voice cracking on the question. He  _ hated _ it, being this vulnerable. He  _ hated _ this virus, this hospital, this awful dystopia they’d all been thrust into without a choice in the matter. Most of all, though, staring at those images of his husband’s doomed brain with a discouraged doctor behind them, he hated himself.

“Of course,” she confirmed with a smile, and he put his hand out to shake hers- a formality. It was sloppy and rushed, and he would’ve cared more about his manners any other time that his heart didn’t feel like it was actively breaking, crumbling apart in his chest between two shriveled, struggling lungs. “The nurses have been made aware of Tweek’s mental state and will likely be keeping a closer eye on you both. They’re informed on when they must deny you entry to his room, because there will be times that it will be extremely harmful for you to interact. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry, Craig.” She sighed. “I don’t usually tell people that so personally, but I am sorry. I know how dedicated you’ve been to his recovery, and how much this horrible virus has done to us as a people.” She paused, her hands clasped in front of her, before adding, “You may stay in here as long as you need.”

Craig nodded slowly, unable to speak and thankful for her understanding, and she left, keeping the door open just a crack. In the privacy of her office, surrounded by framed doctorates and that damn insistent clock, Craig started to cry.

It began quietly. He sniffed, and his eyes burned, and he wanted to go home, but not to his current home. He wanted to go home to the house he lived in with Tweek in Denver, the place they’d created so many memories that now stood abandoned and likely raided. He wanted to unhook Tweek from the machines that were keeping him alive and have him be so affected by his loving touch that the virus disappeared, or his immunity was contagious, or  _ something, _ but it was a fantasy, and he knew it. He glanced once more at the CT scans displayed neatly beside each other and decided that ultimately, he wanted to cry, and he did.

Craig allowed the first hot tear to escape his eye, and when his vision blurred too much to see anything but a muddied mosaic of damning head-shaped rainbows, he dropped his face into his hands. He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his thighs, and cried into his palms. His breaths shuddered and he gasped, the first inkling of a sob, and then it was all over, inhibitions lost, and he wept, pathetic whines between waves of tears filling his cupped hands and burning, always burning. He sobbed and whimpered and began to whisper aloud,  _ “Why, why, no, no,” _ between each sharp inhale, turning dangerously close to hyperventilating while his eyes poured on and on.

He wasn’t sure how long he spent there, waiting for his lungs to collapse and his heart to fail and the world to grow deliriously black, but it didn’t. Time went on, and his gasping slowed to hiccups, and tears stopped forming so that his cheeks remained slick but produced no more rivers. He wiped his face with his sleeves, and reached for the tissue box on Doctor Hammond’s desk to blow his nose noisily. When his face was clear and his breaths were essentially normalized, he looked up at the clock. It was already nearly noon. How cruelly the time moved forward when all he needed was for it to stand still.

Alone again with the buzzing of background ambience, he whispered to himself, as he did once before, “I’m not giving up.”

 

* * *

 

He finally emerged from the room entirely numb, and he was embarrassed to realize his eyes were probably bright red and puffy and plainly expressing his despair. Susan looked over at him with her usual overly cheerful smile, but it dropped a bit at the sight of him, and he figured that if Susan of all people would be caught off guard by his appearance, he must look god awful. 

“He’s just finished eating now, so he’s free for the afternoon,” she informed him, and he strode past her without a word. Tweek’s door was shut, but when he gave his three knocks, he heard a faint,  _ “Come in!” _

The door swung open slowly, and Craig realized he’d been expecting a grisly sight only because he was met with nothing of the sort. “Craig,” his husband greeted, and instead of rushing across the room to embrace him Craig could not bring himself to do it, and he shuffled forward with his eyes on the ground. When he finally grew close, he looked back up at him, to see the life so vividly in his husband’s eyes that it could save a damned soul worth saving. Craig was not one of them, and so he found himself blinded.

“What’s wrong?” Tweek asked, and Craig nearly broke down all over again, but with a resolved intake of air, he sat down at the side of Tweek’s bed quietly.

“How are you feeling?” Craig asked, fearing the answer.

Tweek’s eyebrows raised suspiciously, the confusion in his face evident as always. “I’m fine. The jello was kinda watery today but other than that, I mean. I’m pretty alright.” Tweek leaned forward to sit up, and with the motion he outstretched his arm just far enough to brush Craig’s chin and direct his attention toward him. “I need to know what’s wrong with  _ you, _ though.”

Craig swatted away Tweek’s hand by locking it in his own, and kissed his knuckles quickly before holding them to his chest. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, but Tweek’s confusion morphed into frustration in an instant.

“I  _ will _ worry. Are we late on rent?”

His heart cracked a little deeper.

“No, no. I’ve got that, don’t worry.”

“Then what?” Tweek’s face softened. “Why don’t you want to tell me? We talked about communication.”

“I’m just worried about you,” Craig relented, but he was unwilling to disclose anything further.

Tweek chuckled. “I’m fine, Craig. My setup is all ready to go. Look, they even brought me my favorite blanket!” He patted at the one his father had knitted when he was a young child, a precious piece of his family history that he hadn’t let go of for over twenty years. “They’re gonna take care of me here, Craig. Trust me. Just focus on the family, okay? Do that while I can’t.”

Craig swallowed thickly. “Yeah, alright. You want me to put something on?” He stood to approach the record player by the window.

“Aw man, you brought that old thing too? Jesus, you were such a hipster in high school.” Tweek snickered, and Craig did too, albeit halfheartedly.

“Yeah, yeah. What the hell do you want on?”

“Do you got any throwbacks circa your hipster phase?” Tweek smirked, and Craig laughed, a real one.

“I’m picking at random, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Aw, dude. You better not do that for the first dance at the reception.” Another pang in his chest. Another wound reopened. This Tweek did not remember their marriage, despite the golden band on his left hand. He thought they were still renting an apartment. He forgot about the record player. He thought he was just starting his treatment. That was the only positive, really; when Tweek was lucid, he always complained about how boring it got living in one place. Craig was glad he didn’t remember his suffering today. From the record player, an acoustic guitar strummed.

They spent the rest of their afternoon chatting, and Craig had to try very hard to rewind his own clock to several years prior, where Tweek was apparently stuck this time. He was at least thankful that it was an adult time period. When Tweek reverted to his childhood, just looking at his fully grown body was enough to throw him into an episode. Tweek’s new nurse from the start of a new rotation poked her head into the room to alert them to her arrival, which was a subtle hint that it was time for Craig to go. He planted a kiss in the center of his husband’s forehead, who giggled and called him a dork. Then he left, and he connected eyes with Doctor Hammond as she hung up her doctor’s coat and clocked out for the day. She nodded, but Craig turned away, and he hoped she’d understand.

The importance of his research was stronger now than ever, but, in perhaps the most ironic twist, Craig was too tired today. Not physically, but mentally, and he wanted nothing to do with the dying mice and data deadlines and rattling generators in his lab.

Sometimes, Craig entertained the thought that maybe it would be better for Tweek if he surrendered. Then he could be well-rested and enjoy every moment of the rest of their time together before it was too late, unlike now where he often showed up to Tweek’s room only to fall asleep on his bed. Tweek could fade away like those  cliché movies about people with terminal cancers, happy and surrounded by his loved ones and leaving this Earth on his own terms. Maybe that was what Tweek deserved, instead of this suffering that felt like it was by Craig’s own hand.

When the thoughts got too loud, though, he caught sight of his wedding band. It sparkled as he tugged off his disposable gloves, twinkling to capture his attention and remind him of his fight. It was a beacon of hope right there on his finger, and even when Tweek couldn’t remember, it still had a twin that sparkled back.

Craig had no choice but to believe with his whole heart that Tweek would get better, that his memories would return and he would be normal again. He had to believe they could eventually go home, they could rebuild, and they could have the children they always wanted. He had to believe in Tweek’s ability to heal, and he had to believe in himself, too.

He retired early. Lying in his bed, at his family home where the rooms were a bit colder but the company made it a bit warmer, Craig stared at his wedding ring. He stared until the light dimmed so low that he could no longer make it out in the pitch blackness that night birthed with electricity down. He could still see it though, the glow of the hospital several blocks away, and when he raised his hand to the small square of light that was filtering through his window and at his wall, the gold glimmered straight into his eye.

With the belief that Tweek’s had glimmered back, Craig surrendered to rest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This concludes what I like to consider Act One of this fanfiction. If you've stuck with me this far, I thank you from the bottom of my heart! There's still much of this story to go, and I'm hoping to see you back for the beginning of Act Two. Please, let me know what you think in a comment if you've got the time, and thank you again for reading!


	9. IX

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kenny seems to have an odd idea to offer that throws Craig for a loop rather frequently. While Craig is uncertain of which path to take, he attempts to continue life as usual, but life has a tendency to throw him under the bus.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick thanks to everyone who has been so supportive of me and my work as of late- without your encouragement, I wouldn't be nearly as productive!

“I don’t see why it’s a big deal.” 

Kenny shrugged from his perch on one of the shoddy fold-out tables that housed their disorganized supplies. His eyebrows were raised, the essence of nonchalance, and it was really starting to piss Craig off.

“Do like, any of the immoral human experiments in history ring a bell?” Ike drawled, crossing his arms and rolling his eyes. “Tuskegee, Mengele, the Stanford prison experiments?”

“I mean yeah—” Kenny nodded once “—but those were forced shit. I’m saying you can do it.”

Craig huffed. “Even if you gave consent—”

“Yeah, consent!” He snapped his fingers. “That’s the fuckin’ word, was on the tip a’ my tongue. I consent.” He flashed his most charming grin.

Craig paused, making sure he was quite done interrupting him, and continued slowly, a twinge of irritation making his nose twitch. Kenny appeared unfazed, and continued to smile back at his glare. “Even if you gave consent, there are still a shit ton of laws in place that—”

“Craig, dude,” Kenny cut him off again, and he clenched his fists to release some of the tension building up in his blood. “Laws don’t mean shit no more. Nobody gives two shits about some old laws. I’m consenting. I’m volunteering!” He laid out his forearms, splayed his fingers. “Lay it on me.”

Ike chewed at the end of a pen, making brief eye contact with Craig before letting his arms fall to his sides. “I dunno, he’s got a point there.”

_ “Ike,” _ Craig hissed, and Ike put his hands up, to ease away the poison in his tone.

“He consents, dude.” He sighed, tapping his pen on the open lab book with half a sheet full of notes at his desk. “It’s not like we’ve got a lot of options. We lost our live specimens.”

“The last gone too soon; Remmy, may he rest in peace,” Kenny said solemnly. The candles in the corners of the room flickered, making their shadows shrink and grow like monsters on the walls.

“Our attempts are not nearly good enough for human experimentation. You must know the incredible risk that comes with this kind of thing. We would be injecting you with the virus itself, you know.” Just the idea made his skin crawl. Funny, he briefly thought, how it hadn’t bothered him to do such a thing to animals but the tables turned so violently when humans became involved. It was starting to frighten him, the responsibility that would come with actual human testing. In a way, it hadn’t felt as real when restricted to tiny furry creatures and petri dishes.

Kenny shrugged again, averting his eyes to the floor. “I mean, yeah. If I can help, I wanna help.” He chuckled but without any of the humor. “‘Sides, not like I got anythin’ to go home to.”

The air grew instantly thick with awkwardness and pity. Kenny started to swing his legs beneath him, in and out from under the table. He still didn’t look up.

“I dunno,” Ike said, his brow furrowed starkly by the dramatic candle light as he reasoned his way through the options. “The lines of morality are pretty blurred now, bro. You know you could maybe die, right?”

Kenny nodded, but Craig interjected, ignoring him in favor of Ike’s input. “Isn’t he immune? What help is he going to be if he’s not susceptible?”

“We could try to do testing immediately after injecting the virus, and it like, might work?” Ike winced. “We’re more just trying to figure out if the vaccine itself will kill people.”

“Even then, I—”

“I’m not immune, actually.”

Craig and Ike immediately went quiet, whipping their attention to the man now twiddling his thumbs in his lap while his feet swung back and forth, back and forth, like a child on a swing set.

“What?” Ike laughed. “The fuck you mean you’re not immune?”

“I mean I’m not.” Kenny’s voice had gone soft, oddly serious and solemn.

“You’d be half dead by now, if not all the way dead, if you weren’t immune. That doesn’t make logical sense,” Ike continued to scoff, his complete disbelief making his words come out like teases. Craig was less inclined to joke.

“The rest of your family wasn’t immune,” Craig muttered, biting at his thumb nail, and he saw Kenny tense from above his downcast lashes. “It wouldn’t make sense for you to be immune, actually.” He looked up and Kenny shrunk into himself under his scrutiny, caving in like a cowering starving animal. “How are you still alive? How are you not infected?”

“Well,” Kenny began, but he looked uncharacteristically nervous, “I’m not exactly not-infected either.” Craig and Ike both leaned away from him, mostly subconsciously, as they themselves were immune. “I know it sounds crazy because I’ve seemed fine, but I’m not actually fine. I mean, I’m fine right now, but I’m not always. I go back and forth.”

Craig narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean, you go back and forth?”

“I mean, I get infected, get sick, and then I just kinda… Go back to square one.”

“That’s impossible,” Ike said. “You’d have to die in order to get that sort of reset. That, or you’d need some sort of superpower.”

Ike chuckled to himself at the ridiculousness of the notion, but Kenny said earnestly,  _ sheepishly, _ “It’s kinda both.”

The room went quiet for the third time.

“What,” Ike said, flat without the question mark. Craig was silent.

“I know, it sounds totally crazy, ‘cause it is. I’m not immune, though. Swear. Can test my DNA if ya want.”

“That doesn’t help your case, you know,” Craig said. “I’m even less inclined to experiment on you when there is such a big chance that you’d die if we inject you.”

Kenny chuckled. “Well, I also just said I’ll bounce back, so. It’s really not an issue.”

“I dunno, Craig…” Ike trailed off, biting at his lip and tapping his foot, the picture of a logician’s agitation. Craig could tell it was angering him that he wasn’t understanding what Kenny was explaining. “I dunno.” He looked up, and there was an odd vulnerability in his eyes, so strong that Craig had to look away. Unfortunately in doing so he caught Kenny’s gaze instead, which was full of that inviting warm glow that made everything about this decision so much worse. He sighed.

“Can we think about it?” Craig said, and Kenny nodded with enthusiasm, his smile brimming.

“Oh yeah sure, no prob. Just wanted ya to know it was on the table, ‘s’all. Literally.” He squirmed on top of the table he was sitting on, and Ike laughed nervously. “Next time I’m sick I’ll drop in for a hello, how’s that? Might change your mind.” He winked, and Craig rubbed at his temples, pressing stars into the backs of his eyes.

“I’ll see you Wednesday morning.”

“A’ight.” He hopped off the table and it wobbled dangerously, but stabilized under his strong reflexive grip. He gave the surface a pat and held out a hand for Ike to shake, then Craig. “See ya Wednesday mornin’.”

Craig looked down at Kenny’s extended hand, back up at his patient eyes, then down again before he dropped his hand from his chin and gripped it tight. They shook once, and Kenny’s hand was clammy and felt slightly grimey. He nodded, a hum behind his grin, and took off two steps at a time up the staircase. It wasn’t until they heard the front door shut that Ike turned to look at him.

“He’s crazy,” he insisted.

“Is he though?” Craig asked, and Ike’s hands shot into the air in frustration.

“Yes! Has this shit scrambled your brain too?” Ike growled, gripping at his hair and roughly massaging his scalp. “There’s no way. It’s impossible!”

“Maybe he’s some sort of missing link, though. Maybe there’s something to his DNA we can study.”

“Craig, dude,” Ike deadpanned, “this isn’t sci-fi. This isn’t some mysterious fantasy. Real life science doesn’t work like that. He’s lost his mind.”

Craig went quiet, trying his best to sort out all the new information, but doing a poor job of it at such a late hour. It was making his head spin.

“It’s late, man. Get some sleep.” Ike looked at him sympathetically, reading his mind, and Craig had to agree; his eyelids were starting to droop without his permission, and he didn’t produce his best work when tired. “You can look at it with a clear head tomorrow. I dunno, though,” he shook his head, “I dunno.”

“Thanks,” he finally said, and Ike shrugged at him before heading toward the stairs, shedding the plasticky disposable lab apron he’d been using for weeks. Ike said goodbye and he returned it, and then he was alone in his laboratory.

The machines whirred gently in the background, in a way he’d grown so used to he hardly noticed most of the time. Now, though, with no other bodies in the room, it was deafening against his tired ears. They reminded him of how illegal this was, how dangerous it was becoming, how morally grey it had already become. He could equate his work to some humanitarian self-sacrifice before, but he couldn’t bring himself to the same conclusion anymore. Injecting his serums into a living, breathing person made it different, and he felt even crazier now than he had when he first started researching on his own.

This was insane, he was insane. Still, the thought of Tweek forgetting his own name fired him up with fear-fueled ambition. Tweek forgetting  _ his _ name. He laughed at himself, for how selfish he’d become.

He dragged his feet up the stairs to the first floor, then the second, and with a heavy sigh and a groan, he collapsed onto someone else’s bed. He didn’t bother kicking off his shoes. He fell asleep so quickly he couldn’t remember it the next morning. Then he walked to the hospital, the sunrise illuminating his path, and life forged on.

 

* * *

 

“Did I miss any homework?”

It was astounding just how much five words could injure him.

“Nah. Easy day.” He felt like such an expert liar and actor now. Tweek would be proud of him, if he knew. The record player crackled where a scratch distorted the sound. Craig refused to throw it away- it was one of his favorites. David Bowie wasn’t exactly his usual scene, but the song felt too personal after Tweek had texted it to him in sophomore year.

 

_ The title is just like u ;P _

 

He hadn’t exactly become an astronaut, but that was alright. He felt like he’d reached the stars anyway, at least for a few years. He’d get there again too, once Tweek was healthy and alive again. 

“The nurses told me I’d be here for a while. Is that true? I don’t know if they’ll talk to you, since you’re not my parents…” Tweek trailed off and a fond smile graced his lips. “When did you get so scruffy?” He reached out and scratched at Craig’s chin affectionately, and Craig closed his eyes, the raking of his clipped nails over stubble soothing and familiar.

“You know I’m lazy.”

Tweek laughed. “Sometimes.”

“You give me too much credit, hon.” He said it with a smile.

Tweek shrunk a bit in on himself and Craig lurched forward, ready to grab his shoulders should he fall forward, but he shook his head to say he was fine. “S-sorry. Don’t worry. I just still get butterflies when you do that.”

“Do what?” Craig asked, and Tweek giggled.

“Call me pet names. It’s not something I’d have expected, before we started dating.”

Craig smiled, crooked and the slightest bit pained. He’d been calling him hon for nearly ten years, now, but it was new to this Tweek. “Maybe I’m just full of surprises.” He stood from his bedside chair, pushing aside the table on wheels that had the remnants of his anemic lunch still on it. He took down the guard on the side of his bed with practiced ease and scooted in next to Tweek, his arm wrapped around his shoulders after tousling his hair first.

“I like finding the new things about you.” Tweek’s smile turned more playful, his eyes crinkling. “Call me the one I like so much.”

Craig huffed — he knew where this was going. “Darling?”

“No, y-you know!”

“Baby?”

“Come on,” he goaded, shoving into his shoulder affectionately.

Craig hesitated, then heaved an overdramatic sigh. “Sweetheart.”

Tweek’s smile grew too wide to stay closed, his teeth poking through his toothy grin. “I’m sorry for exploiting you. It’s just so cute!”

Craig rolled his eyes with all of his love in it. “I know, my lisp is adorable.”

Tweek rested his head on Craig’s shoulder with a hum that buzzed where his throat touched his arm. “I love you.”

Something about how young this Tweek acted gave Craig butterflies too when he said something so strongly, and he pressed his cheek into his golden lion’s mane. “Love you too,” he mumbled, muffled by hair, and he completed it with a quick kiss to the side of his head. Tweek hummed happily at him again, and for a blissful moment, Craig forgot the heartbreak that made this moment so bittersweet.

“C-Craig?” Tweek spoke up, his voice small, “I don’t feel so good. My head is getting k-kinda fuzzy,” and like that, the heartbreak was back in full force.

“I know baby, I know,” Craig whispered, and he held him tighter against him by the arm wrapped around his shoulders. He then shifted his hand to rub against his back, to provide a tiny comfort as Tweek fell into an episode.

“I’m not dying, a-am I?” Tweek asked, quietly terrified and between scared, quick breaths, and Craig hushed him, making the sound of ocean waves between his teeth.

“Not if I can help it,” Craig murmured, and Tweek began his trembling. He whimpered and Craig pressed another kiss into his temple, fighting back the burning in his eyes. Strong, be strong.

“I-I,” Tweek tried, but his jaw locked up, and his voice trailed off. “I,” he breathed, and Craig felt him drop his full weight into his side, shaking like a leaf and yet so still. 

Craig used his other hand to caress his cheek, turning his face to his and avoiding his vacant eyes to kiss his forehead, right between his eyebrows where his pained worry lines were wrinkled. “Shh,” he insisted, “shh,” but Tweek would be silent either way.

"I love you, sweetheart,” he whispered against his soft skin, and he pressed the call button on Tweek’s remote.

He stayed beside him, holding the tissues beneath his nose while it dripped blood and running his fingers through his hair until the nurses arrived with his restrictive gear.

They strapped in his ankles and wrists and Craig stopped the record player before walking out, no more words to say.

 

* * *

 

Kenny had been unusually quiet that morning, but Craig wasn’t one to question him. He was a bit of a nuisance as a person, and he preferred to keep their interactions professional. Kenny was kind enough to make pleasant conversation on the drives to and from the compound at least, but this time he hadn’t even bothered with that. He was a bit sniffly and spacey, and Craig assumed a cold was to blame.

“The boss wanted me to tell you he’s been happy with your work,” Will said, a slight awkward smile on him to ease the tension of their strictly-business contact. Craig grunted.

“I’d hope so.” He didn’t offer anything further than that, and though Will looked a bit irritated at his passiveness, Craig had to wonder why he hadn’t expected that kind of response from him in the first place. He loaded up the truck and Kenny hacked up a lung, and Craig tried not to feel too concerned for him.

“Something the matter with you?” Craig finally asked after another coughing fit on the drive home, and Kenny shook his head.

“Nothin’ I ain’t used to, man,” he said, his voice a bit hoarse.

“You don’t need me to drive, do you?” Craig asked, and Kenny laughed without the humor in it.

“How you figure we’d do that?” he asked, and Craig felt a bit silly to have suggested it, and so he shut himself up.

He spent the majority of the drive daydreaming without a chatting partner, reminiscing about the times before the world got sick. He missed the strangest things, like toothpaste and lotion for when his hands cracked, things that he’d most certainly taken for granted before. Sometimes he asked to use Tweek’s shower and spent an hour just standing in the hot water. He was lucky to have access to the hospital’s heated water and plumbing in general. He’d hate to have to sponge-bathe the way most people had to nowadays. It never felt truly clean to do it that way.

The truck swerved with another heavy cough and Craig slammed at the wood that separated him from the driver’s seat. “Hey! You better not fucking — ” but he was cut off with another veer that hit the buzzing strips on the side of the road. “Kenny?” he said, but he got no answer.

“Kenny?” he repeated, and Craig started to panic, leaning out of his crate to look at him, and he looked fine from behind. He was about to yell at him to pay attention to the goddamn road when before his eyes, Kenny’s hands slipped off the wheel, and Craig looked up to see a turn in the road.

“Oh fuck — ” he said, quickly but quietly, then shouted with all his energy,  _ “Kenny!” _

He didn’t respond.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he repeated, and in his meager few seconds to make a decision, he grappled with the possibility of either ducking into his crate in a weak attempt to protect himself for what looked like an inevitable collision with a guard rail at sixty miles per hour, or try to lunge into the driver’s seat to take the wheel. His hesitation cost him the time to act, however, and Craig watched the rail get closer and closer with each tiny, panicked gasp he made between calls to his unconscious driver.

He briefly wondered if he was going to die.

Then the guard rail was a split second away, and he curled up into his crate, and they collided with unyielding metal.

The sound was deafening, and he felt the truck soar and begin to flip, but then he cracked his head on the side of his wooden shield, and everything went silent and black.


	10. X

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Repetition and restarting and renewing, the natural cycle of life, ticks on beyond Craig's comprehension.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello my friends! It has seemed a bit longer wait than usual, so I hope I make up for that with a longer chapter than usual this time around. I've done a lot of editing on this one and I'm still not 100% sold on it, but the show must go on, and I can always go back to edit things later! That's what I tell myself, anyway. Enough rambling from me- enjoy!

When Craig first opened his eyes, he realized he couldn’t hear.

He blinked himself rapidly back into mental clarity, the columns of smoke and sprinkling of splintered wood obstructing his view and assaulting his lungs. He briefly feared that he’d lost his hearing forever. As he began to hack and scald his throat with hot, smoky air, however, his hearing started to return, and with it came what amounted to equally deafening ringing.

His head spun and his eyes felt like knives stabbing his sockets while he looked frantically around him, taking in what he could already see. He was partially obstructed by the broken remains of the crate he ducked into, and he got to work shoving broken boards of old wood out of the way so that he could get to fresh air, because his coughing hadn’t stopped and he could feel it building in his lungs and making his eyes water. He then wondered if he’d suffocate like that, if it was possible to, but he broke free from the lattice that had trapped him with one last aggressive shove outward, and though the world teetered on a tilted axis, he pushed out from his prison and gasped desperately for cleaner air.

He was unable to determine if the pain stabbing him between his ribs was an injury or the strain from his choking, but a quick brush across his chest revealed no blood, so he assumed it was alright. He continued to cough and take ragged breaths in, and he crawled away from the mess that had trapped him moments before. Scrapes ran along his arms where jagged bits of wood had gauged him in his clawing to escape, and they beaded with deep maroon blood, some of it dripping down between risen goosebumps and spilling between his fingers. His elbows shook and he dragged himself as far as he could manage across the pavement, the abrasions to his knees hardly noticeable amongst the many other afflictions that were making his head pound and his muscles quiver. Though it was cold outside the sun felt hot on the back of his neck, and a cold sweat was spreading over his skin in a thin coat. Eventually he ran out of steam, and he collapsed on his side, a groan echoing through his entire body as the weight of his effort pressed him into the Earth like a weighted blanket. He could see the dotted yellow line of the highway a foot away from his twitching fingers. His breaths still felt labored and difficult. His eyelids fluttered and threatened to close again.

He snapped awake, his vision spinning and swimming, but present because he knew he couldn’t afford to drift back into unconsciousness. Craig had just remembered that he had a partner to find within the wreckage.

_ “Kenny,” _ he tried to say, but it came out like a hoarse whisper, and he coughed weakly as he slowly sat up to face the truck.

The front of it had crumpled into the guardrail, and the truck had somehow ended up on its side several hundred feet down the road. Smoke plumed from the front of it, but nothing appeared to be actively on fire, which was good. There was broken wood and torn tarp everywhere, as though someone had taken a child’s project and squashed it with their palm, and worst of all, Kenny was nowhere to be found from where he sat.

With great effort and a deep, pained grunt, Craig got back on his knees and tried to push himself to a standing position. He moaned as his head pulsed with aching pain, but he got onto his feet and started to limp forward. At some point, his left leg had gotten a nasty gash in it, and although nothing felt broken, it still hurt a considerable amount and slowed him down.

“Kenny?” he tried again, his voice gaining some power as he stumbled forward, but he still heard no answer. The front of the truck had ripped apart from the back, and was tipped forward so that its crumpled bumper balanced against the road. He tried placing a hand on the warped hood of the truck to look into the seats but jerked his hand away when it burned him. His heart was pounding, the anxiety deep in his chest so overwhelming that it numbed nearly all his senses. He pulled at the airbag, which had gone off and then deflated in a way that completely obstructed Craig’s view, and he looked into the truck, having to blink away stars while he moved.

Kenny _ was _ there, and he did not look good.

“Kenny, hey,” Craig tried, because he looked to be unconscious still. The seatbelt held his chest in place, but the dashboard of the truck had been smashed so tightly into Kenny that his pelvis looked pinned to his seat. He tried not to think about if the scene below was bloody or not, and focused on trying to get Kenny alert again. He touched his shoulder and shook it gently, and immediately Kenny came back to life, hacking and coughing just as Craig had when he first escaped. He looked over at Craig and a small trail of bloody spit painted his lower lip, his eyes cloudy and distant. “Are you okay?” Craig asked, stupidly, and he would have smacked his forehead if he didn’t have a raging headache.

Kenny took an extra moment to cough before replying in a raspy, pained voice, “Peachy.” He dropped his head down to try to scope out the damages to his body, and when he looked back up at Craig with the color draining from his cheeks at a rapid pace, Craig felt glad that he hadn’t looked down first. “Don’t think I’m gonna make it, bud,” he managed, and panic sliced through Craig’s already imploding calm.

“Yes you will,” Craig snapped, and somehow just the action of speaking harsher hurt his head too. He figured it must be a concussion. “I’m going to…” he trailed off, looking up out of the truck and at the abandoned highway they were stuck on. He recognized it as not being too far off from home, but far enough that probably no one heard the crash. He would have to walk to the border himself. “I’m going to get help.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Kenny growled, “yer gonna hurt yourself crawlin’ around like that for me. Tha’ broken?” He was looking at Craig’s leg, and though it looked ugly, and oozed an awful lot of blood, it didn’t feel broken. He tried to shake his head and hissed, reflexively reaching for his forehead and pressing the heel of his palm into his brow. Kenny tsked at him. “Dumbass.” He coughed and groaned.

“How do you plan on getting home then?” Craig said, speaking through gritted teeth as the spots dwindled from his vision, and Kenny huffed a pained laugh.

“If ya let me be, I’ll be home tomorrow.”

Craig’s brow creased. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sure does, Craig,” Kenny replied, as though what he said made perfect sense, “sure does.”

Craig didn’t have time to argue with him, and tried to lay the airbag back down so that it wouldn’t cut off Kenny’s supply of oxygen. It was apparent he couldn’t be moved, not with his bare hands, and he would have to hurry back to town if he was going to prevent another death from burning into his bones like a curse. The guilt of what had happened hit him like a freight train, so suddenly that he nearly stumbled. “God, Kenny, I’m sorry,” he said, but he didn’t think the words were nearly enough.

“If you’re gonna go then you better get goin’ or you’ll get caught up in the eldritch crossfire, dude,” Kenny coughed, and more of his bloody spit oozed from his lips. He weakly attempted to forcefully spit it from his mouth and it splattered where the windshield was shattered and the pavement was visible. He was, for all intents and purposes, speaking in tongues, and with the way Craig’s heart kept pumping too loudly for him to hear anything else, the fear that he wouldn’t make it out alive felt tangible and terribly realistic.

“I’m coming back,” Craig reassured, weakly, though he wasn’t sure why he felt such a need to say it. Maybe he felt responsible in some ways for the injuries Kenny had sustained, and all the damage to his cart. God, and all the lab supplies- how was he going to explain them away when he got help? Fear kept his heart pumping, pumping, and as he limped away, watching Kenny’s head bow as he relaxed into the sling that his seatbelt had become, regret made what wasn’t injured already ache just as well.

The combination of hot and cold on Craig’s body was stifling, and made him feel sickly. His limp got worse, and he struggled to turn enough corners so that the wreckage Kenny lied in was beyond view. Still, he stumbled forward, his breath ragged, with the deeply horrible feeling of a guilty conscience shoving him in the direction of the South Park border. His leg felt so pained it was almost numb, and he was waiting for it to actually get to that point from a combination of the injury and the weather, as it would make his struggle the slightest bit easier.

As he hobbled down the road toward his salvation, his brain began to feel scrambled and foggy. Fearing the worst—some sort of traumatic brain injury, most likely—he tried to focus on counting backwards from 100, counting in time with his own steps as they rattled him to his core. He was going to need some actual rehabilitation after this was over, he knew it, with how much strain he was putting on his injured legs. A hospital visit, at the very least.

Tweek was going to be so mad at him.

His steps became shorter as he inched himself down the paved hill that dipped down from the carved mountains and into the basin in which South Park was nestled. He eventually knew he had been spotted, because from within the border came an armored truck. Craig lifted an arm to shield his eyes from the sun and make out his rescuers— the vehicle was not unlike a slightly larger golf cart, with two officers shoved inside to make it look like a clown car in comparison to all their bulky gear. Exhaust trailed behind them and plumed into the air in segmented dirty clouds. They had rifles strapped to their backs. Craig quit walking, and paused his countdown at fifty.

“What happened to you, son?” one of them asked upon idling the truck beside him, and for some reason a prepared answer came flying out of his mouth before he could think about it.

“There was an accident. The truck crashed coming back from the compound.”

The men raised their eyebrows, one of the few expressions Craig could discern from behind all their layers of protective gear. “You’re not the usual guy we hired,” one said.

“He was…” Craig’s brain short-circuited, because where  _ was _ Kenny? Why had he been alone? He wouldn’t ordinarily allow such a thing, he couldn’t imagine anyway. “He was sick. I went instead.” He didn’t know where the answer came from, but as soon as it left his lips, it felt like the most honest truth. Yes, of course, Kenny had been ill, and of course Craig had to make the journey out to collect what little food they could provide for everyone in his stead. Or no, had he even done that? His leg hurt, why did his leg hurt?

“I don’t know how you snuck out of the border, kid, but you’re in serious trouble if you think—”

“Gale, look at him. He’s cold and hurt. Shut the fuck up and let him into the truck.” For emphasis, Craig shivered, and the sympathetic soldier reached an arm out for him to grab. He used it to hoist himself into the back seat, and, blessed with the chance to sit down on something soft, he melted quickly into the bench.

With a heavy sigh that released some of the built up tension in his bones, he let his eyes droop and his arm and leg hang limp over the edge of the seat. It wasn’t a very comfortable ride, but it was better than walking, and his body ached so  _ much _ all over.

“Seriously, what happened to you?” the nicer soldier asked, twisting around in the passenger seat to eye him warily, and with confused, brutal honesty, Craig stared at the injury on his leg as though it wasn’t his own.

“I don’t know,” he replied, and he didn’t, not at all.

 

* * *

 

His hospital visit had been uneventful, save for the handful of stitches he needed for his leg and a few larger cuts on his arms. A quick image determined that his concussion was relatively minor, and that it would dissipate gradually if he gave himself time to rest (a laughable request, really). He hated getting wheeled into the emergency room; even though hardly anyone batted an eye nine times out of ten when someone came waltzing in and got in line, he still felt exposed and uncomfortable. He always thought it was odd the way people had to wait in line in the emergency room, as if they were waiting to check out at a store.

The benefit of being mostly-fine was that he wouldn’t have to stay overnight, and so no one would have to go hunting for his family to tell them the news like an alarming game of telephone- not that he went home every night anyway, but an actual telephone would have made everything much easier. He wished their old phones weren’t serving as bricks in his desk drawer at home with the rest of their deceased electronics.

_ “What the fuck did you do?” _

Of course, Craig hadn’t gone straight home.

“Honey, give me a minute to explain,” he said, carefully, with his arms out as though taming a beast, but Tweek’s wild eyes were blazing and darting all over him, assessing every bump and bruise and scrape in a way so tangible Craig could nearly hear his brain whirring.

“What! Why are you hurt? What the hell happened to you?” His questions were as rapid-fire as the frenzied bouncing of his pupils in his tired eyes.

“Tweek, I’m fine. It was,” he began, but he paused, because for some reason recalling the reason for his injuries was proving difficult, “it was nothing.”

“That doesn’t look like nothing,” Tweek warned, his gaze now fixated on the way Craig’s leg was awkwardly avoiding weight and covered in gauze and tape. Craig followed his line of sight and sighed, limping across the room to sit on his bed with him. The nurses that had stood at the door in wait pulled back but didn’t disappear completely.

“It’s fine baby, come on,” he murmured, and Tweek melted the way he always did when Craig said ‘baby,’ which Craig was well aware of and used to his advantage more times than he could count in the past decade. He let his neck go slack in Craig’s gentle hold as his fingers slipped into his mane of golden hair, leaning back into his touch so that Craig felt his skull resting in the palm of his hand. There was something so open and trusting about it that it melted him too.

“What happened?” Tweek tried again, and when Craig groaned at his persistence, he whipped a finger around to point it into his chest. “No, I’m not letting it go. Why do you look like you went through a blender?”

“I just got… caught up. There was a crash,” he chose carefully, but before he could elaborate further, the two soldiers who had rescued him knocked on the door and allowed themselves in. He thought he’d shaken them on his way here from the emergency room, but it was apparently not so. They were more intimidating indoors, with their rifles high on their backs and heavy bulletproof vests fastened over military uniforms. Craig was tall, but these men somehow felt taller, and stronger.

“Mr. Tucker, I’m sorry for interrupting, but we’ve been informed by our supervising officer that you’ll need to undergo questioning regarding the circumstances of your rescue,” the slightly taller one said, stiff and staring hard into his chest but not his eyes. The apology didn’t feel genuine.

“I-is he in trouble?” Tweek stuttered, shrinking into his bed and looking to Craig with wide eyes for guidance, but because Craig did not know for sure either, he just ruffled his hair before regretfully standing to join them, silently.

“He shouldn’t be,” the other officer said, and the words were odd, misplaced and not quite fitting in the air of the room so that they felt awkward and threatening. Craig looked back at Tweek and gave him his most convincing smile, which he knew was not convincing.

“I’ll be back,” he said, and Tweek, confused and paranoid, nodded slowly and subtly as the understanding came to him delayed. As he did so, speckles of golden dust from his halo bobbed with his head and sprinkled down into his lap and face, to sparkle in his eyes. With that, the soldiers led the way out of Tweek’s room and out of the ward, down the hall and to the right where the hospital security office had been transformed into the equivalent of a miniature military base. There was an empty room that Craig was ushered into, but the door was kept ajar, which indicated to him that not only was this not a matter of serious offense, but they also lacked the resources to record a confrontation and needed witnesses.

“Please recount to us the circumstances of your rescue,” the man across from him said after sitting down to meet equal footing, and Craig only then bothered to realize that he’d taken off his scarf and hat so that he looked like a person and less like an action figure without an identifiable face.

“I was… outside, of the walls. I had been in an accident and couldn’t drive back.” He tried to choose his words carefully, and with a sharp trickle of fear that sliced between his lungs, he remembered that should they investigate the accident, they’d find lab materials with stamps for another lab in the wreckage.  _ ‘Aint no jails, Craig,’ _ echoed in his head, Kenny’s voice—

“We had men scope out the route,” his interrogator said, his eyes cold and disbelieving. “Nothing on the road for miles. Got an explanation for that?”

Craig faltered. He had definitely been in an accident. He could remember the smoke, and the metal and wood. Kenny—

A zap traveled through him like a small electrical current and washed over his head, seeping into his brain and making him groan. He put his forehead in his hands and willed it to go away, and the silence in the room was punctuated by the deafening ticks of a wall clock that hurt just as bad.

“I have a concussion,” he explained, looking up to glare boldly into the eyes of his adversary. “I think it’s caused lapses in my memory. I didn’t do anything.” With his clipped words he dared the soldier to keep pushing, pulling himself together to stand his ground. Suddenly a feeling he hadn’t encountered since his teenage years presented itself; that without Tweek beside him, he could be as mean as he wanted.

There was an extended pause between them. Craig’s head continued to pound, and the soldier’s blue eyes were hard and unyielding. They held a silent staring contest, but with each second Craig’s mind drifted farther away, until he could hardly remember why he was there, or what he was supposed to be doing. The officer seemed to have a similar moment because his face looked confused for a moment, just a moment, before Craig faded from the room entirely.

His mind swirled, unsure of its proper place and spinning just slightly off-kilter from the rest of him. For a split second, he became deeply fearful. His vision blurred, and the shapes in front of him changed, morphing into the scene of his dining room table back at home.

“Pass the bread over, Craig,” his father grunted, and Craig looked up, blinking rapidly before following the command and gripping the bread bowl to send it to the head chair. The radio droned on, a few whistling notes indicating the change in topic, and Craig rubbed at his face, feeling exhausted from a long day spent in the hospital lab. He looked down and observed the cuts on his arms that he’d sustained in a nasty fall at work.

 

Tweek had been so mad at him. 

 

* * *

 

“Have you noticed them?” Ike asked, under his breath and hardly enunciated while he adjusted his scope without bothering to look Craig in the eye.

“Noticed what?” Craig pulled on his lab coat and adjusted his pocket full of pens, tugging one out to take inventory. The sun had already set, the candles already lit, and the solar-powered lamps beaming down at their most essential work benches.

Ike grunted at his scope and leaned back, his brow screwed up from the way he’d been squinting. “There’s guards all over the fuckin’ place.” He tugged at his rubber gloves and rolled them up over his fingers, turning them inside out to toss them out. “More than usual. I guessed it was why you weren’t here yet.”

Craig sighed while he pulled on his own pair of gloves, picking at the fingertips to pull them taut over his skin. “I thought I’d just been paranoid.”

“Just be careful, bro.” Ike got up from his seat and finally looked at him, in the way he sometimes did where Craig felt as though he saw right through him. It was unnerving, intimidating, and it annoyed him that such an irritating teenager could pierce his confidence so cleanly through. He did everything in his power not to show him that he felt that way, though.

Several seconds of silence passed between them, where Ike’s stare grew stronger and Craig’s resolve grew weaker, and their shadows waxed and waned all around them. “What?” Craig finally asked, and Ike sighed, breaking eye contact at last to lean one hip into a table and fold his arms.

“You’re not gonna like it.”

“I don’t like a lot of things. What’s wrong?”

Ike snorted. “Yeah, you sure fuckin’ don’t.” Craig bristled, but held strong. “I’m not feeling confident about this most recent batch. Like, at all.”

Craig sagged against the staircase, slowly letting the banister sink into his back and hold him in place. He wasn’t sure he’d have the strength to stand tall otherwise, especially when his leg still ached when he used it too much where stitches held it together.  “Explain,” he demanded, and Ike popped open a bottle of sanitizer and rubbed it into his hands and arms up to the elbows.

“We knew the glycoprotein wasn’t getting anywhere, so I’m glad we stepped away from that, but now I’m not sure how the recombinants are working out. I was messing with it under the scope just now, so there may be something visual you can pick up from there, but I dunno.”

It always freaked Craig out a little when Ike spoke in such long sentences, compared to his usual short utterances. He took a moment to think, then walked around the work benches to sit down in front of the scope in question. “You mind talking me through it?”

Ike yawned loudly, to punctuate just how much he did not want to do that, but he sauntered up next to him anyway. He leaned forward and looked into the eyepiece, twisting the lens to bring the image into focus again. With a quick flourish of his hand, he motioned for Craig to take a look. Ike spoke to him as he focused the lens for himself.

“I’ve been trying to inject plates with our most recent attempt all day long, but every time I introduce it, the cells just keep dying. They’re self-destructing on contact, and I can’t figure out what’s different about these strains from the ones we’ve been using that’s caused such a difference.”

Craig slowly twisted the focus bit by bit until the image of the cells—and their remains—came into view. Sure enough, a vast majority of them had died before the slide preparation was completed, indicating that it took only moments for them to fall apart. He sighed heavily. “We don’t have the technology to keep fucking with recombinants.”

“I know,” Ike said, “so I dunno if we should just like, bail on it, try something else, or what.”

Craig peered into the scope again, studying the outlines of the dozens of cells turned to husks which spelled their doom. When he disconnected himself, he tented his hands, and dropped his face into them. He rubbed at his eyes, screwing up his brow while he pushed into his temples where a permanent headache lingered ever since his fall. “We can’t start over. Not again.”

“I mean, we could try,” Ike said with a shrug that Craig felt more than saw, “but I dunno how much we can do, I mean. We’re running out of time.”

Craig whipped his head up at that. “What do you mean we’re running out of time?”

Ike looked caught, trapped in his words, and he stumbled over an explanation. “I just mean, well, I know it’s a degenerative virus, and I know it’s been a while, and I mean. I can kinda connect the dots.” There was a lengthy pause between them. “Is it getting bad..?” he asked with a surprising amount of gentleness. It took a lot of strength for Craig to remember that no one went untouched by this virus, and that included Ike.

“They gave him a year,” he answered, quietly, and Ike’s twinge of pity spelled across his face disgusted him. “I can take care of him. I can do it.” He looked up at Ike and could feel how vulnerable his eyes were, but he didn’t care. He was getting too tired to care. “We’ll try something else. We can try altering the hepatitis ones next. It’ll be cheaper.”

“Yeah,” Ike sighed, and he put a hand on Craig’s shoulder, heavy as an anchor and sad. “We’ll keep trying, Craig.” For once, Craig didn’t shrug off his touch, let it hang on him with the weight of it all without the care to shy away.

“Get some rest tonight,” Ike insisted, the worry in his brow irritating but also somewhat comforting. “Tweek will kill you if you kill yourself.”

Craig laughed weakly, pressing at his forehead again and allowing himself the bitter smile. “Yeah, he would.”

Ike’s hand left his shoulder with a little shake, and he walked up the stairs, leaving Craig with the task of striking through their faulty work and starting fresh, again— always again and again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why do I always update these things in the middle of the night, in the worst hours? I'm impatient, oh well. Drop me a comment if you please, otherwise thanks for reading! Almost at 100 kudos too- I must thank you for that!


	11. XI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Craig opens up to changes in routine, he finds meaning in his friendship with Clyde that he's been slow to rediscover. Bad news makes his happiness short-lived, however, and a new surprise catches him entirely off-guard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys! I know it has been way too long since I've updated, and for that I apologize! I wonder if there is a trend of me saying this yet... I had a few other projects that needed my attention first, but now, for the most part, they are taken care of! I've been working on this chapter a lot in little pieces and hope that it is up to par, but may make some changes if I see some errors later. It's a bit longer this time around, too. Thank you for your patience, and please enjoy!

The walk to Tweek’s ward was essentially a straight line across the basement, and when Craig was dead tired—as he often was—he found it terribly boring. Each step would thump through his whole body as though it weighed twice as much, his shoulders sagging forward while he let his guard down for lunch. He found it considerably less boring, however, with another body beside him, its steps inherently lighter than his own. 

_ “Can I join you?” _ Clyde had asked, somewhat sheepishly with his toes dug into the ground before parting ways the night before, before Craig’s night truly began. It caught him off guard, and it seemed Clyde had been hesitant to ask but maybe wanting to for a long time.  _ “Maybe it’d cheer him up.” _ Craig couldn’t argue with that because Tweek often complained about only seeing the same ten faces all the time, so he agreed. He was trying to be kinder to Clyde, after all, and maybe he’d enjoy it too.

“You must get bored of this walk,” Clyde commented absently, his eyes looking all directions despite probably being at least moderately familiar with the hall already. It was always nice to see him outside of his lab coat- it felt more real, almost like old times, except now Clyde grew substantial amounts of stubble and had thinned out some with the weight loss everyone seemed to struggle with. His beat-up jeans hung a little loosely on his hips with the aid of a belt.

“Yeah,” Craig agreed, nothing more to add, and Clyde smiled, seemingly pleased with his response. The man would be happy with anything, Craig was pretty certain, and that both irritated and touched him. His good mood made him look bad. He hoped Tweek wouldn’t comment on that. Speaking of.

Craig took Clyde’s arm, recognizing they were nearing the elevators that would take them right to Tweek, and pulled him aside next to the wall. “I need to talk to you,” he began, and the way Clyde looked up at him with concern felt too malleable to meet, so he looked down at his shoes while he collected his thoughts. “Listen,” he started, and cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Tweek isn’t always who you last knew in high school. Where he is in his own timeline changes all the time. I can’t promise what he knows and doesn’t know, and whenever something he doesn’t know comes up he goes into an… episode,” he decided carefully, “and gets hurt. I don’t want that.”

Clyde nodded slowly, seriously. “Yeah dude, I get it. Are there things I shouldn’t say? Does he remember high school?”

“For the most part, yes,” Craig said. “He usually knows up until graduation, but even that’s not a guarantee. I just want you to keep quiet until I can kind of coax out of him where he’s at. Hopefully you showing up will help do that for me. I just want you prepared for the worst.”

“God, Craig,” Clyde said, the sad puppy eyes he was giving making his chest sting a bit, “I’m sorry you have to go through this, all the time. It must be hard. I mean, at least with Sarah—” he cut himself off to take a moment to swallow thickly, and Craig’s stinging chest bloomed with sympathy, suddenly remembering the lonely gold still wrapped around Clyde’s left ring finger “—at least she went, you know, pretty fast. I dunno what I’d do if she’d forgotten things about me or herself constantly.”

Craig mumbled a quick affirmation, still not feeling comfortable looking at Clyde when sadness seemed to ooze from his gaze. There was probably pity in there too, of course, but it didn’t make Craig mad like it did when anyone else gave him the same response. Somehow Clyde felt different, like maybe he genuinely felt sad instead of politely. He appreciated his sensitivity now more than he ever had in high school.

He reached out and put an awkward hand on Clyde’s shoulder. “I’m sorry about your wife,” Craig said, forcing himself to look Clyde in the eye so that he knew that he meant it. “I’m sure she was a great person.”

“Yeah,” Clyde said quietly, his eyes glassy and smile wavering, “she was.”

It took a moment for Craig to pull his hand back and clear his throat again awkwardly, and Clyde chuckled quietly. “You never woulda done that in high school,” he teased, but there was appreciation in his delivery and he was wiping at his eyes with the back of his hand, and it made Craig hold back just a touch on his snappy reply.

“I’m not the same guy you knew in high school,” Craig countered, and Clyde sobered up with a hum as they walked into the elevator and took it up to Tweek’s floor. They didn’t speak again for the remaining few minutes of their travels, wrapped up in a comfortable silence that spoke of the many years they spent doing the exact same thing, as kids.

When Craig knocked on Tweek’s door, he heard a quiet but cheerful beckoning of,  _ “Come in!” _ and it pleased him to know that he was probably expecting him. He gave Clyde one last glance, a warning, and Clyde shut his lips closed with a tight nod. Craig swung the door open and stepped in first.

“Craig,” Tweek said softly, smiling, greeting him with his usual tenderness. He was sitting cross-legged on top of his bed with the sheets messily pooled around him. Craig hovered by the door instead of responding to his reaching, which visibly confused him.

“I have someone with me,” Craig said softly, everything about him soft now, and some of the tenseness in his back muscles relaxed so that they ached with the phantom pain of their relieved efforts. Tweek leaned over, squinted his eyes to try to grab a better look, and broke out into a glowing smile that instantly lit the room with gold.

“Clyde!” he exclaimed, “is that you? Aw, oh man, dude,” he laughed, the joy on his face a radiant sun, “how-how long has it been? Jesus, where have you been?”

Clyde barged past Craig’s weak barrier and flew to Tweek’s bedside to envelope him in a huge hug so characteristic it felt silly to have expected anything less. Craig watched Tweek close his eyes as he rested his chin against Clyde’s shoulder, the peace within him so moving he could feel the affection from the doorway. He smiled as he consciously kept his distance, allowing them the moment. Tweek laughed again, this time breathlessly and gently, and Craig could hear the suppressed sniffles of their friend underneath it. “S-sorry, that I’m like, you know,” Tweek pulled his arms from around Clyde’s shoulders to gesture at his entire self, “like this.”

“Are you kidding?” Clyde said, wiping at his eyes for the second time that day with a smile on his face so big he couldn’t keep his mouth closed. “Tweek, bro, it’s so good to see you.” He took a shaky breath and Craig froze, almost expecting him to burst into tears, but he composed himself enough to pull back and sit down at the chair beside the bed, and Craig relaxed.

“Yeah, you too man! I’m sorry I haven’t been keeping in touch too well, but you know, life,” Tweek waved off, the shy guilt on his face endearing. “How _ is  _ life? Um, S-Sarah, was it?” He hesitated a bit in what seemed like fear that he was misremembering, which then grew worse when Clyde visibly deflated.

“She got sick, dude,” Clyde said quietly, no longer looking Tweek in the eye, and Craig watched Tweek’s face crumple, “she didn’t make it.”

“Oh, I-” He reached forward and instantly put a hand on Clyde’s arm, his face full of sympathy and hurt. “I’m so sorry, Clyde.”

Craig realized with a pang of guilt that Tweek had just shown Clyde more sympathy in sixty seconds than he had in the first six months that they began working together.

Clyde shook his head. “It’s alright dude, you didn’t know. A lotta people didn’t make it.”

“I know. I’m really lucky,” Tweek said gravely, and then he tried to divert the conversation to something a little lighter, idle chatter, in an attempt to make Clyde smile again.

All throughout, Craig was trying to hide his surprise. He hadn’t known that Tweek had maintained contact with their old friends beyond graduation. He’d dropped them all himself pretty quickly. He hadn’t known about Sarah until finding out she was dead, but Tweek seemed to at least know that they had been together. How much did Tweek know about the friends that had come to pass from their younger years?

He wondered if it had been the distant attachment of Facebook, which was something Craig had never really bothered with. Tweek did, though, and maybe he saw the engagement announcement or the marriage notification while idly scrolling. He wondered if Clyde had invited him to his wedding and he’d done such a good job avoiding his history that he didn’t hear it. He remembered being asked to change his own relationship status on an account he never touched at Tweek’s urging, which he didn’t really understand. He understood a little better now, learning of this. It was another way that humanity used to pulse quietly along in unity. Used to.

Craig was snapped back into reality by watching Clyde reach into his messenger bag and pull out a sandwich, never looking away from Tweek as he did so. Craig knew that fear all too well- that if he looked away, that would be it, and Tweek would be gone. He tried not to think about it too much. He finally sat down in the chair on the other side of Tweek’s bed and started munching on his own lunch, one hand holding a sandwich and the other rubbing gentle circles into the soft, sunken flesh of Tweek’s arm. Tweek paused his conversation to smile at him appreciatively for the contact, and press a little kiss into Craig’s forehead that planted flowers in his brain.

“So,” Clyde began, taking a big bite out of his sandwich before continuing with his mouth half-full, “you gotta tell me about these walls, dude. The hospital just lets you paint all over?”

“P-pretty much,” Tweek confirmed with a shrug, and Clyde’s eyes were bugged out. Pride swept over Craig.

“They’re really good. I don’t know anything about interior design or whatever, but it really brightens up the room. They say that on those home improvement shows, right?”

They had a conversation about painting and annoying nurses and weather, and Craig was silent, content to listen while his husband and old friend connected as though nothing in the world was wrong, and they were 18 again. That was the magic about Clyde, he supposed; Clyde was timeless. Never in his life would Craig have thought that to be a valuable thing about him, but here he was, so very grateful for the light Clyde cast in Tweek’s eyes while the sun filtered in behind them. It made the paint shine and Craig had to agree that it brightened up the room, but there were two other sources of light that early afternoon, and he was blessed with the privilege of watching them all glow, and live, and be.

 

* * *

 

The gentle clinking of silverware against plates was frequently the only sound between them at dinner time. They were a family of few words, forever, always, and so discussions over meals were rather few and far between. There was of course still a togetherness to be had, and when Craig had come back home to live with them again it remained the same as when he’d been a child, which was somewhat soothing. The only difference was that they had Helen now too, who didn’t speak much since Richard’s passing anyway.

Craig therefore appreciated the times he got to eat with them all, even if it was a quiet, passive routine.

On the table sat a giant pot that his mother had placed in the middle with a serving spoon sticking out over the lip. They had pasta, which was somewhat of a rarity nowadays—it was odd to consider it as such, since it used to be a dish they’d eat weekly when Craig was still home and the world still whole. It was hard to get ahold of noodles now, and harder still to get sauces or the ingredients to make them, but Kenny had swiped a couple jars at his last visit to the compound that Craig smuggled home, at his insistence. Something as simple as a plain red sauce and noodles shouldn’t taste as good as it did, but combined with the bread that they tore apart and ate alongside most meals, it was truly decadent.

“How’s Tweek,” his father grunted, not bothering to look up from his plate as he asked or place a questioning inflection on his tone, and Craig grunted back.

“Fine,” he said, then thought to add, “Clyde came by to visit him.”

“Oh, Clyde!” his mother exclaimed, a smile on her face at the memory, “I forgot that you two were working together now. How is he?”

Craig let a smile break through. “He’s good I think.”

“You should invite him over here sometime. Is his father still…?” his mother tread carefully, her face easily revealing the discomfort with which she tried to ask if Clyde’s dad was still alive.

Craig wasn’t actually sure about that, and that was frightening in itself. He hoped it wasn’t a lie: “Yeah, I think he’s okay.”

She hummed in response, but didn’t actually have anything to say, so they fell back into silence while they shoveled in their pasta so that it filled their stomachs in a way more substantial than most dinners. Craig felt lucky that he received more rations for his work and through the compound, knowing it could be much, much worse. Though he’d never admit it out loud, he worried about Ike, and Kenny, and pretty much anyone outside of the hospital. The lives they now led were never ideal, but especially not for them.

Mechanically, they finished their meals, and they dumped their bowls in the sink where they would wait until morning for one of them to lug them out back in a bucket of water and scrub them clean. It was probably Tricia’s turn, judging by the way she sighed at the larger-than-usual pile, a product of a more involved dish. The sink was more of a storage space than anything previously useful, without properly running tap water.

Craig wiped off his hands on one of the many dish rags strewn over the kitchen counters and went to climb the stairs to sleep a few hours before nightfall, but his arm was caught by a strong hand. “Son,” his father boomed, like he always did when he had something important to say, and Craig immediately straightened his posture. “I need to speak with you.”

He let go of his arm and Craig rubbed at it, returning to his full height only two inches shorter than him, and tried to hide the flames of nervousness that licked at his stomach with a shrug of his shoulders. “‘Kay,” he said, and Dad nodded. Craig wished everything between them wasn’t so chronically robotic.

The rest of the family had made themselves scarce without Craig even noticing, which was a skill only mastered when conversations with Dad were so awkward and disjointed. They were frozen in the hallway, the kitchen to the left and the staircase to the right, and the setting sun casting fires into the hardwood flooring beneath them.

“Everything alright at the hospital?” he asked, and Craig blinked, feeling sixteen again and under scrutiny for plotting to borrow the car at midnight. Tricia was such a snitch when they were kids. Tricia was nowhere to be found now, though, not even after instinctively hunting for her prying little eyes peeking around a corner like they used to when she ratted him out for one thing or another.

“Yeah, why?” Craig asked, shifting on his feet but keeping his back stiff as a board.

“Just seems off, you know,” he said. Craig didn’t really know, but nodded at him anyway.

Dad sighed, and gestured with a jerk of his neck for Craig to follow him into the living room. Now it really felt like he was in some sort of trouble- sitting in the living room with Dad was always a bad sign. He was getting that creeping uncomfortable feeling of guilt for something he didn’t know he did in the pit of his stomach, and now instead of feeling sixteen he felt even younger—twelve, ten—very, very small.

He sank into his big arm chair with a loud sigh, and Craig sat opposite him with his hands in his lap. Dad kept his eyes on his feet and didn’t speak for a long time. When he did speak, it came out softly, the way it did when he knew he needed to try to be kind, which was only in the most serious of situations. It unnerved Craig right off the bat.

“They’re shutting down more places. Soon they’re not gonna have anything left except that hospital. And I don’t know how long they’re gonna keep that either, son.” He sounded tired, like he’d been living with the burden of this knowledge for decades. The cold trickle of fear in Craig’s heart froze in place, making itself at home in defiance of the sunset’s embers.

Craig stared down at his hands as he picked at the dirt beneath his nails, thinking. This conversation was eerily familiar. News always came to him like this—seriously, suddenly, painful and hard to process.

“They’re cutting more power?” Craig croaked, and Dad grunted and nodded in response. Yes, they were. “How do you know?”

His father sighed again, his breath heavy and billowing invisibly toward the floor as though made of lead. “Combination of my boss and the radio.” Craig glanced toward the kitchen at the little device sat on a side table where the light would hit it, to charge it. Dad listened to it most mornings before going to work. “Never got anything to say on the news, but they made a quick comment about more restrictions. Government bullshit, like the last time. Less food, too.”

Craig glared at his lap, the information settling slowly like a fiery rock in his stomach. “Government bullshit,” he said more than asked, but his father made an agreeing noise at the back of his throat.

“Like they did when they cut power the first time, and water lines. Said the government was conserving energy so changes had to be made, yada yada. You remember,” he said, and Craig’s brow slowly knit while a tangle of anger knotted in his stomach. “So. I thought you should know.”

For a moment, Craig was silent, processing, boiling. Then, like a rubber band snapped in two, Craig let all his frustrations out. “What do they need to conserve for?” Craig asked, unable to keep the anger out of his tone while he clenched his fists over his lap. “The fuck is even open from the government that they need to conserve? All we get is an airdrop once a month and McCormick’s truck, and the most I see of those bastards is their asses sitting at the gates!”

Craig hopped to his feet, the energy from his rage pumping his blood too fast to sit still. “The fuck are they guarding us for?” He let out a little ironic laugh and ran a shaky hand through his hair, tugging at the strands and reminding himself of Tweek pre-medication.

Dad raised a hand, muttered an urgent, “Craig, calm down-”

“No, I’m  _ not _ calming down!” His throat was snarling, teeth gnashing, and he felt like a wild animal: wounded, afraid, defensive. He glanced at the staircase and the ugly floral print wallpaper was a call to action. “I want some  _ god _ damn answers!”

Craig caught a glimpse of his mother at the entryway, heard her start to cry,  _ “Craig, please!” _ but his arm was already wound back, and with a feral growl he smashed his fist into the wall.

The pain in his knuckles was instantaneous and white hot, and he swore while he bent over with his limp, abused hand cradled in the other. He knew it was stupid, had known as soon as the thought of punching the wall crossed his mind, but the power of his frustrations had him so riled up that he reverted to an overly emotional teenager. God, he hadn’t done that since he was a teenager. He was a mess.

“I’m not,” he rasped, focus bouncing rapidly back and forth between his shocked mother and stoic father while he heaved labored breaths, “gonna let them kill us. Kill Tweek. I’m not.” The energy fell off him in waves, like satin curtains unfurled and pooling at his melting feet, and he sagged. His parents said nothing, and so he darted up the stairs, rubbing at his sore knuckles and mumbling a few more curses for good measure.

On his way up to the second floor, he caught the eyes of his mother-in-law. Helen was frightened and worried, the slightest bit tearful, frozen in her chair and so clearly troubled: by his actions or his words, he couldn’t know.

Craig’s chest collapsed and he looked away, too ashamed to apologize.

 

* * *

 

“Toss me the plaque counts,” Ike muttered from under his face mask, his eyes never leaving the petri dish under his careful hands, and Craig leafed through the soft binders beside him, tugged out the appropriate book, and shoved it across the table. He muttered an even quieter “Thanks,” that Craig didn’t acknowledge. The clock above them ticked after the exchange, but beyond that, their only company was the gentle whirring of the idle machinery.

Craig’s eyes hopped between his own binder and the blank stickers he was painstakingly copying information onto, to label their next specimens. Bitterly, he recalled the automatic printers at work, and how much time they subsequently saved. Just like home, there were little things about ordinary life and work that he regularly missed. He let out a little sigh as he wrote a wrong number in an alphanumeric sequence of nine, and ripped off the label to toss it in the trash.

“What’s the sigh for, bro,” Ike asked without inflection, and Craig glanced up, not surprised to find Ike still leaned in close to the face shield while he carefully counted plaques. He hesitated, but decided to drop his pen in favor of leaning back in his chair and ripping off his gloves to scratch at his head.

“Wrote a number wrong,” he admitted, and Ike hummed.

He kept leaned back for a moment longer, watching the way Ike worked with practiced ease and diligence and imagining how proud his parents might be of him. Well, one, he supposed, with Mrs. Broflovski long gone and in the dirt. Something about the apocalypse around him had Craig feeling slightly less averse to the idea of an afterlife, though, and he figured she’d be proud too. Or maybe they wouldn’t, for the fact that he was doing so illegally—who knew. Craig wasn’t sure how his parents would feel if they knew either.

“What are the numbers like?” Craig chanced, and Ike huffed into his face shield.

“Not much different. There’s a decrease, but I’m not sure if it’s reliable. We’ll have to grow more of these.” Craig sighed his dejected acknowledgment, and took his time to stretch his arms up over his head before putting new gloves on, wincing when his back cracked. He let a full breath flow in and out of his lungs, and as he let go of the last trickle of air, at the same time as Ike finally glanced up at him with his hard brown eyes, the distinct sound of banging on a door echoed from up the stairs.

They both ducked down instinctively and locked eyes, surprise and shock jumping between them like electricity. Craig’s heart leapt to his throat and his stomach vacated the premises, the bottomless feeling of pure fear making him sick. If it was a guard, they were fucked, and who else would come to their door? The knocking persisted, however, urgent but slowing down, and Craig tilted a little nod at Ike to communicate his intentions. Ike’s eyes widened, but he kept silent.

He crouched low and crept up the stairs, grabbing for a broom on his way as the only method of self-defense available. The knocking had now slowed down to nearly a stop, but just when Craig thought it was over, a loud thump resounded like a clap of thunder that had him freezing halfway up the stairs again. He glanced back at Ike, who was looking up at him with such childlike fear that he could believe that he was still in middle school. A twang of guilt plucked at his chest at that, only now realizing the danger he’d been putting Ike in when their lives were potentially at stake. He hoped something about his nod could be reassuring, and he crawled up the last few steps without looking back again.

When Craig slowly pushed open the basement door, he looked to his left where the front door faced him directly. There were no windows to peek through, but no sound had been made since that final thudding noise. It was raining outside. Carefully, cautiously, Craig stepped into the hall and approached the door with his knees bent low. For a moment, he entertained the possibility that it was a rampant tree branch blown around by the apparent storm. Then he heard another knock.

He glanced down at the bottom of the door, having realized the sound came from near the ground instead of at regular eye level, and grew even more confused. He took slow steps toward the door with his broomstick wielded in both hands, ready to swing it like a baseball bat. He took a few moments to breathe before he began unlocking and turning the doorknob. With blood rushing through his head at breakneck speed, he yanked the door open as quickly as he could.

He brandished the broom and his eyes darted back and forth, but just like the knocking, there was no one at eye level. It wasn’t until he reached for the screen door to venture out to investigate that he realized there was a nearly unconscious body on his doorstep, crumpled into itself and shaking like a leaf.

Craig’s blood ran cold.

_“Kenny..?”_


	12. XII: Part I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick note before we begin: 
> 
> The original version of this chapter came out to a whopping 7,600 words, which amounted to around 20 pages of pure writing. I realized this is too much to shove into one chapter, so I decided to chop it in two pieces. I'll upload the second half of this arc shortly after this one. See you then, and enjoy this one as well!

Craig jumped to action immediately upon recognizing Kenny’s ratty coat and blond hair. The rain was pelting his back as he bent over to grip Kenny’s shoulder, dropping to his knees to tend to him. He held a shaky hand in front of his face and breathed a momentary sigh of relief at the gentle puffs of air that tickled his palm. He leaned further over to take a look, and caught Kenny blinking slowly, still conscious. “Kenny, what the fuck-”

Kenny giggled, barely there and back shuddering with the effort. “Will you use me yet..?” he croaked, “Come on, Craigster…”

“Kenny, it’s gonna be okay,” Craig said, even though he had no idea if that was true, and somehow, it felt like he’d said it before.

“Just take me inside, use me,” Kenny said, and his eyes finally slid to meet Craig’s, hazy and glossy, delirious.

“What are you talking about?” Craig asked, but then he realized he had yet to pull Kenny out of the rain, and he did his best to clumsily gather him in his arms. He was paper-thin and frighteningly light, though Craig supposed he shouldn’t have expected any less. He closed the front door with the toe of his shoe, and quickly stumbled across the dark house into the living room, to one of the old abandoned couches still lying in wait.

Ike chose that moment to peek his head out from the basement, just barely visible from the door, but he shoved it open and hopped up the last steps immediately upon realizing what—or who—was now on the couch. “Holy shit,” he breathed, and he scurried up next to Craig who was now attempting to take off Kenny’s dripping coat. “What happened?”

“Kenny, what happened?” Craig asked, echoing Ike but deliberately leaning closer to Kenny’s ears. He slid his gaze lazily to Ike, their question ignored. A smile stretched his chapped lips.

“Hey golden boy. Been a minute, how’s it hangin’,” he said, but it was horribly slurred and barely intelligible.

“What happened?” Craig urged, his voice harsher, and Kenny looked back at him.

“Got sick, dude. Told ya I’d get sick,” Kenny said.

Then his eyes rolled back into his head and he went limp, thoroughly unconscious.

_“Fuck,”_ Craig spat, and he turned to Ike on a frenzied heel. “We gotta get him to the hospital, _now.”_ He didn’t know what Kenny meant and he wasn’t interested in waiting to find out. Ike, however, appeared to have other plans.

“How can we do that? We can’t carry him that far.” He had his game face on, the same one he used while he calculated, brows furrowed and eyes threatening to cross. The one where Craig could nearly hear his brain computing like the machines in the basement. A gust of wind made the whole house groan, and the shifting of their shadows came alive on off-white walls.

“Well we can’t—we can’t treat him here,” Craig said, and as he spoke, he realized he was growing short of breath, threatening to hyperventilate. He forced himself to take a slow breath, and as he did so, Ike bit at his nails.

“Why would he come here in the first place?” Ike asked, voice muffled by the placement of his fingers at his lips, and they both eyed Kenny while he took shallow breaths in his temporary slumber. _Hopefully temporary,_ Craig corrected himself, as he couldn’t know.

Thankfully, Kenny’s eyes then fluttered, and Craig and Ike both tensed, Craig kneeling to get up close to Kenny’s wandering eyes. They were rolling in their sockets and watery, and his forehead was hot to Craig’s cold and clammy touch.

“Sorry, man, I’m still in here, kinda,” Kenny mumbled, and he rubbed at his eyes with a groan and sat himself upright. Craig and Ike shared a quick look of confusion. “I got sick dude, I said I’d get sick.”

Kenny blinked at them both while they sat in silence, processing his words. “You don’t mean CMV,” Ike said slowly, carefully, lowly, “right?”

“I do, goldie,” Kenny rasped, and he shuddered so aggressively he threatened to fall off the couch, which Craig prevented with quick steadying hands. “I keep gettin’ it. And I keep dying. But I was thinkin’”—he paused to shiver, his right eye twitching erratically and hands quaking in his lap—“w-was thinkin’ you could test on me, ‘member?” He looked up at Craig with big, watery eyes, reminding him so much of an injured child he struggled to remember they were both twenty-five.

“I don’t believe you,” Ike replied from behind Craig’s shoulder, steely and callous in his skepticism, and Kenny recoiled at the harshness of his tone. “There’s no way. If you were susceptible, you would’ve caught it and died a long time ago.”

Kenny cringed. “I did. I keep doin’ it. I can’t explain it dude, just… Just test me. Test me for it and you’ll see.”

Kenny didn’t sound right in this desperate tone. He was meant to be the eternally carefree figure that mildly pissed Craig off most of the time, not this vulnerable child with what could be a deadly mutation coursing through his veins.

“He’s showing the symptoms,” he muttered to Ike over his shoulder, and Ike’s brow furrowed deeper, contorting his face into confounded wrinkles.

“You’re joking. They could be symptoms of anything.”

“Tremors, confusion, loss of consciousness,” Craig listed off, counting on his fingers, and Ike shook his head wildly with a growl before uncrossing his arms and shoving them out in front of him, to block Craig’s words from entering his bubble.

“Again, that could be anything!”

Kenny dropped backwards on the couch, his eyes half-lidded and his breathing labored, and Ike raked his hands through his hair while his breaths hissed between his clenched teeth.

“Ike, calm down,” Craig urged, but Ike just flashed his cold eyes up at Craig and bit more aggressively at his reddened fingertips.

“I’m not going to-”

Kenny shuddered with an audible shivering sound, and Ike shrank from his offensive pose. “There’s no way,” he insisted, though he sounded much less confident than the first time, meek as he tried to melt into his shadow though it ran from him in the lightning. Nothing but their breathing, nervous and shaky, permeated the thickening air after that.

Craig stood to his full height and stepped away from Kenny’s side, choosing to pace. His thoughts raced, so quickly he could hardly register them, but he knew he had to calculate the positives and negatives. He had to choose the right path, and seemingly on his own, judging by how closed off Ike’s mind already was and how distant Kenny seemed. Just like that, he already knew his answer.

“We still have some of the blood testing kits from the mice, right?” he muttered, breaking the tense silence, and for just a moment when he looked at Ike again he could see fear in his eyes. Then he froze over and gave Craig a dangerous look.

“Craig,” he warned, but Craig challenged him with his own hardened gaze. The rain drowned them, trapped them together in their hijacked house filled with old family portraits of unknown, vanished people. Thunder rumbled in the distance, crackling lightning in their eyes.

“We’ll test him. We can come up with a game plan if he tests positive.” Craig let out the extra breath his lungs had inhaled, and rested his forehead in his cupped hand. If he was negative, he’d figure out a way to get him to the hospital, lest he die of some other ailment. Though the thought was shocking, if he came out positive, Craig wasn’t so sure that he would turn up the opportunity that Kenny was trying to provide. That frightened him.

Ike opened his mouth, like he was going to attempt to argue, but instead he closed it and set his lips in a thin line, and trudged downstairs to find a blood kit tucked away behind the archives of their months of tireless data. Craig sank into an adjacent chair and watched Kenny’s fingers tremble where they fell open on his lap. Memories of his husband’s violent twitching and glossy, confused eyes were all that he could see.

 

* * *

 

“How does it look?” Ike asked, his tone as hesitant and quiet as it had been ten minutes prior, and Craig made a low, irritated grunt of frustration while he leveled his eyes with the gel in their archaic apparatus, watching the tiny bubbles fizz.

“Not any different from ten minutes ago,” he muttered, and Ike snapped his jaw shut, like he’d done the last two attempts to milk unavailable information from him. He closed the door from where his head had poked in, and returned to his post. Upstairs, their impromptu patient slept on one of the couches. Every moment he spent out of his sight felt like a risk, and Craig kept glancing at the staircase, like he could see through the foundation of the living room floor to check on him. The minutes ticked on and on, too long, each sixty seconds feeling like an hour while he stared. He spent the idle time staring at his shoes, trying to ignore the flames of fear that licked at his stomach and made it turn.

Finally, it was ready, and as Craig switched off the cell and began to remove his sample, he had an odd, sinking, then overwhelming feeling that Kenny was not lying to them.

Ike creaked the basement door open, and Craig made a loud hushing hiss while he concentrated. Ike didn’t speak, but he did hop down the staircase two at a time to meet him at the light Craig was carefully directing himself to, sample in hand. Before he clicked it on, he spared Ike a glance, who did the same so that their nervous stares met in solidarity before they tugged off the ceiling light and flipped the machine’s switch.

Bright light filtered around them while their eyes focused on the prize. In the center, surrounded by a messy pool of excess liquid, was their evidence.

Kenny matched the positive control almost perfectly.

“Shit,” Ike breathed, “shit, shit, _shit,”_ and he whipped his head back to Craig to give him a fiercely terrified look. “What do we do?”

Craig thought for a moment. He studied the results, hoping to find some flaw he could reference that would make it false. He could find none, however—the run had been a perfect success. Kenny had Mutation B in his system, the same that kept his husband attached to half a dozen machines in a perfectly controlled hospital room meant to keep him alive, yet he still deteriorated.

“Craig,” Ike murmured, his eyes darting back and forth between Craig’s shirt sleeve that he tugged on and the basement door, and Craig flipped off the light. He stood silent for a moment.

“...We’ll bring the couch down here.”

Ike’s eyes grew wider, if such a thing were possible. “We can’t _experiment_ on-”

“We _can,”_ Craig growled, “and we _will.”_

“Craig, no.” Ike shook his head, backing away slowly on trepid feet. “We can’t do that. Everything is too experimental. We could kill him, for fuck’s sake!”

“CMV will kill him anyway,” Craig said, and the way Ike shrunk under his gaze only strengthened his words. “Kenny asked us to use him. I intend to use him.”

“But-”

“If you don’t think you can handle this, you can leave!” Craig roared, bringing his hands down on the nearest table with a thunderous boom and forcing Ike to take a hop backwards in fright. If the situation weren’t dire, he might feel bad about it. “The door is there and it has always been unlocked,” he snapped. “Leave if you can’t handle it. I’m using him.”

“This is malpractice,” Ike whispered, while the last of his courage left him in his voice. “You’re not even a doctor. This isn’t right.”

Craig paused. He let his breaths slow down, the vibrating of the raging heart in his chest lessen, his shoulders slump. He sighed. “A lot of the things I’ve done aren’t right, kid. A lot of them.” He rubbed at his forehead, the beginning of another days-long headache forming in his temples. “You won’t stop me now.”

When he made time to look, Craig saw a frightened boy before him, crumpling into the mops and brooms and buckets that lie against the unfinished wall. His eyes were wide, his face white as a sheet, and his arms curled up against his chest while he made himself as small as possible, a cowering mouse before a hawk. A twinge of guilt struck Craig’s chest, and he sighed again, lower and deeper. He leaned forward on his elbows on the table, relying on it to keep him standing, and let his head hang, tearing his eyes away.

“You can leave, if you want. You don’t have to do this.” The dripping of the storm drains echoed in his ears. Craig felt like he was melting with the rain water, his insides so torn to pieces that it scattered in all directions and left the rest of him a puddle to wilt. Fogginess threatened to overtake his mind, his judgment, his feelings. Then he looked at his hands, the way they gripped at the slate table top, and the way his knuckles shined white where his fingers strained too hard.

He looked at the way his wedding band contrasted it with warmth.

“I’ll help,” Ike said, shaky and quiet, but there. “I’ll help you.”

A rush of fear threatened to paralyze Craig at Ike’s acceptance, to remind him of what he was about to do, but he nodded, and stood up straight to start what little they could try. He absently twisted his ring while he walked up the stairs. Ike trailed behind as a duckling far too smart to be meddling in Craig’s delusions, insane in their hopefulness and all he had left.

 

* * *

 

Harboring a patient dangerously ill with Mutation B on a couch wedged into an illegitimate lab was not a situation Craig could have expected, or condoned had he been asked months prior. Here Kenny was though, sweating and twitching and groaning while Ike and Craig compared notes as quickly and efficiently as they could manage.

“26A had the best yield for prevention-”

“But we need elimination. 14 caused the best _reduction-”_

“By 40%, which won’t be enough.”

“Better than nothing-”

“Maybe, but there’s not anything stronger? Did you try higher concentr-”

“It made a negligible difference, even at triple, and we can’t go past that or risk amplifying the thing instead of killing it-”

“We’re gonna fucking kill him, Craig,” Ike said, voice raised higher with each passing sentence, and Craig stopped his protesting to look him straight in the eye.

“We’re gonna try to save him,” Craig insisted, and Ike just sighed, knowing every time that he tried to challenge Craig he would be hit with a brick wall. Good. There was no time for arguing anymore. Kenny’s brain was surely swelling more by the minute, and they definitely didn’t have the medical degree or the equipment to relieve the pressure if it got much worse. Craig shook his head, and returned to staring down at the many binders splayed out over their largest tabletops. He pointed at the third one, flipped open to one of their many trials to reference.

“I still say we try 14. It’s the strongest one we’ve had so far. 14C had the best, most consistent percentages. 40% is better than nothing. It’s all we’ve got.” Craig took a second to look up at Ike, worry in his brow, and Ike’s face mirrored it. “Agreed?”

Ike didn’t answer right away- instead he put his fist to his jaw and turned away, pacing a bit behind the table where Craig couldn’t reach and thinking deeply. “That one had the best count reduction?” he confirmed, and Craig nodded at him. “Then I don’t think we have much of a choice.”

A thick tension fell into the silence that came between Ike’s agreement and Craig’s silent hesitance. He knew what he had to do, exactly where 14C was currently stored, where the syringes and phlebotomy kits were shoved, and yet he lingered on the thought that this might kill him. They might just kill Kenny, and then what?

“We’re doing this,” Craig asserted, but it was weak-willed in tone, almost embarrassing. Ike nodded slowly, understanding, and turned to retrieve their last hope. Craig turned instead to Kenny.

He was lying down properly on the couch, shivering no matter how many blankets they tried. The shivering became more like convulsing at times, and he kept muttering nonsense words that Craig couldn’t understand. He was so horribly close to death. It ached that they didn’t have a drug that could help him, maybe reduce the swelling and the suffering. All they had was this attempt, with such a feeble success rate of 40%. Craig was well aware that should they fail, Kenny was going to die within the night.

Ike swung around the corner and stood next to Craig, observing Kenny for an extended moment before saying, “Do you want me to hold his arm steady?” It was his own way of finally declaring his solidarity.

Craig agreed and took the phlebotomy kit, and Ike knelt, taking Kenny’s arm and gently coaxing the crux of his elbow to face outward. It was perhaps the gentlest Craig had ever seen him act. Craig then got to his knees too, and he made eye contact with Kenny’s far away gaze, which he wasn’t sure was focused on him or not. The thought bothered him.

“Kenny,” he murmured, as quiet and calm as he could, “I’m going to try one of our experiments, okay? You need to tell me if you feel worse. Can you do that?” It was somewhat of a futile request, knowing how this condition worked, but Kenny did nod at him, and he had to take that as consent.

Craig prepped the needle and carefully, gently, slipped it into Kenny’s forearm. Kenny let out a short whine, and as Craig pushed their concoction into Kenny’s veins, he was once again hit with a terrible fear that he was killing someone, right here, in this unknown basement. And it would be entirely his fault. He dropped the needle in their makeshift sharps bin with a loud clatter and leaned back in his chair, inexplicably exhausted. Now all they could do was wait.


	13. XII: Part II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part two of chapter twelve, delivered promptly as promised! This may sound rich coming from me, but this chapter is exceedingly bleak. You've been warned.

Craig and Ike kept watch of Kenny’s condition together. It was unspoken that he wouldn’t have long to live without a constant stream of fluids and anti-inflammatories, should their makeshift drug fail, and they didn’t have those supplies at their disposal. If there was any sign of improvement at all, then, well- Craig supposed they’d play it by ear. The uncertainty that surrounded their actions was maddening, and it fried all of Craig’s nerves beyond soothing. 

As it stood, however, Kenny had not seemed to worsen or improve, and Craig wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or a bad one. He continued to shake, but not any differently from before they’d injected him with 14C. Most worrisome were his hallucinations, which manifested as his deceased family members. Thirty minutes in, he had called out for his mother, only to howl in pain and sob into the roughly upholstered couch he occupied. Ike rubbed his back while he cried it out, every time. Craig feared Ike had experienced such grief enough times before that he instinctively made the effort. They didn’t really talk about pasts much, though, as unofficial colleagues, and so Craig could never know for certain unless he felt he had the right to ask.

“How long has it been?” Ike asked, his tone somber, and Craig flicked his eyes to the clock, illuminated by candlelight.

“About an hour.”

Ike sighed. “He hasn’t seemed any different to me. You?”

Craig grunted. “No,” he said as he shifted, groaning through a yawn and a tall stretch of his arms above his head with his clipboard left to rest in his lap. “We need to give it more time, though.”

“Do we even know how long to wait?” Ike asked, and Craig shrugged. His noncommittal response seemed to bother him, and Ike never hid his agitation well. He started shaking his leg, tapping his heel up and down against the cement floor while he brushed his fingers through Kenny’s sweaty, matted hair.

The rain had slowed to a near-stop, and the dying of its sounds dropped them into an even more uncomfortable silence. Craig’s notebook was essentially empty, with nothing written except that there had been no noticeable change from his first notes describing his initial symptoms, before the injection. He tapped his pen against the paper where his next note should be scribbled, trying idly to match the rhythm of Ike’s foot-tapping. It was too fast, so then he tried half-beats, but then it was too erratic, and he quit altogether.

Then, at the one hour, thirteen minute mark, Kenny made an especially violent shiver that threw Ike’s hand from his head, and Ike tried to soothe him with whooshing sounds while Craig doubled down on his clipboard. Kenny opened his eyes, their appearance unfocused and watery, and as Craig jotted that down, they threatened to roll back into his head. Will seemed to keep them forward, and Kenny’s trembling increased.

“It’s okay, you’re okay,” Ike murmured, his fingers threaded back through his hair. It was gentle, sweet—misplaced. There was something unnerving about a child comforting a dying adult, and that’s what it looked like—Ike was a child, thrust into chaos, entirely too weathered in spirit for the age of its vessel.

Kenny gasped dramatically, the sound of air sucking into his lungs painful to listen to, and his eyes went wide. He blinked, frenzied and frightened, and finally his eyes fell directly on Craig’s. Craig felt a cold chill pass through his body at the contact, so alien and so heavily laced with empathy that it pooled in Craig’s gut as much as it pooled in the tears in Kenny’s eyes. His notes became very suddenly unimportant, forgotten in his hands as his entire consciousness was captivated by the wild look in Kenny’s eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, but something gurgly came out, and all it did was start a coughing fit.

He had to look away to cough, and that gave Craig time to re-center, and write his notes shakily on paper so poorly that he’d surely struggle to read it later. “Kenny, hey,” Ike murmured, trying to stabilize him by carefully holding his head in place, “try again, buddy. What were you trying to say?”

“Mm,” Kenny tried, his trembling making his voice ripple like troubled waters. “M-my family, treat them first,” he pleaded. Ike and Craig made measured eye contact, Craig searching Ike’s eyes as though within them he could find confirmation that what they were seeing was truly tragic. That it was real, and something they couldn’t imagine. Slowly, he lowered his eyes to his paper, and wrote ‘ _ memory- deteriorating’ _ in careful print.

“Um,” Ike started, clearly unsure of what to say. Kenny spoke up before he could continue.

“Are they okay? A-are they gonna be okay?” he asked, and Ike’s uncertainty visibly morphed into panic bit by bit as he grappled with what to do. He shot Craig a more purposeful look- one that Craig was unsure how to respond to either. He settled on comfort.

“They’re fine,” Craig lied, and Ike’s shoulders dropped some, relieved of their worries. Still, he looked troubled, and truthfully, Craig felt troubled too.

“T-thank you, thank you,” Kenny said, and his expression relaxed, and his eyes rolled back into his head as his labored breathing slowed down and rattled in his chest.

He hadn’t wanted to lie to him. At the same time, however, he didn’t want Kenny to suffer with being reintroduced to the fact that the McCormicks were long gone. He knew what reminding the disintegrating mind of someone infected with Mutation B could do, as he’d seen in his husband far too many times. Kenny was too fragile for a system reboot, especially without a fully trained arsenal of medical professionals to save him should it go awry.

It was as Craig came to this conclusion that he realized that Kenny was not improving, by any long shot.

Kenny was still dying.

He had to take ten shaky breaths before he felt he could speak clearly. “Ike,” he said, and the boy sat up straight to attention, to listen. “This isn’t working. 14C didn’t work. He’s not going to get better.” The words felt like poison on his lips.

“You don’t know that!” Ike bit back, but as he realized the tone he’d taken, he recoiled, clearly terrified of the repercussions of his outburst. Craig hated himself so much for having given him reason to be afraid in the first place. “Sorry, I just- you never know, he could-”

“Ike,” Craig insisted, and fear manifested in Ike’s deep brown eyes, an inky black like obsidian in this dim light.

“I don’t want to give up,” Ike whispered. His hand stiffened against Kenny’s cheek, where it rested in an attempt to comfort him. “Please, I just- I can’t lose another person. I can’t deal with it.”

Craig could so easily sympathize.  

“ ‘S alright, golden boy,” Kenny slurred, and Ike jumped, jerking his hand from Kenny’s feverish skin. “Always come back.” Kenny’s eyes were closed, eyelids too heavy to bother opening them, but on his lips was a smile.

It was one of those smiles that looked like someone was at peace with whatever tragic thing was thrown at them. It was a smile of acceptance. Kenny knew he was dying, too.

“Craig,” Kenny croaked, startling Craig this time from his own wandering thoughts, and he leaned slowly forward. “Write it down.”

“What?” Craig asked, but Kenny just cleared his throat at him.

“Write it, that this one didn’t work. A-an’ when you finish it, tuck it somewhere”—he paused to shudder—“somewhere hidden. F-forget about it.”

Craig’s brow furrowed, the words circling his head without landing on an understanding. Ike was similarly confused. “What are you talking about?” he supplied, as Craig wondered the same thing.

“T-the resuh-” he was interrupted by a tremendous shudder, which crossed his eyes and stunned him for several seconds of eerie silence. “The results,” he started back up, back to the regular tremors, and Craig leaned in to listen closer. “You have to w-write the results, ah, down, and-” he quit again, this time to gasp for air as tears filled his eyes so quickly they formed fat droplets that rolled down his cheeks immediately. They followed the tracks of the tears come before them, dried but still scoring rivers down his skin, and with a weakly clawed hand, he reached out to grab Craig’s sleeve. He let him take it, and tug him closer.

“My memories are goin’ but I gotta, gotta warn ya,” Kenny gasped. “I dunno if the papers will stay, o-or if the curse will-” he stopped again, his eyes going completely blank and his hand releasing Craig’s sleeve without the power to clench it.

“Will what?” Craig urged, ignoring the curse nonsense for the moment in favor of regaining Kenny’s attention. In his face he saw Tweek, lost in the throes of an episode, and panic’s flames licked his ribcage. “Kenny,” he said, but Kenny didn’t respond. He snapped his fingers in front of his eyes,  _ “Kenny,  _ come on,” whispered on his lips, but his eyes did nothing, frozen in place and face slack.

“What do we do?” Ike asked, raking his hand through his hair roughly and ripping himself from his chair.  _ “Fuck, _ what do we do?” His voice was raising with each syllable, but Craig snapped his attention up at him to freeze his pacing. He paused, and let his tensed arms fall limp at his sides.

“Craig,” he said, his voice cracking and quiet, and the last hopeful soul in the room lost his battle.

“We keep him comfortable,” Craig said, his throat closing up the more he spoke, and he shut his eyes and cast his head away, too distraught by the reminder of his husband’s long battle with the same affliction to keep looking. Though the world was doused in black, he heard Ike step carefully back to his post, and he helped lean Kenny back, who started quivering again. His face was the same though, that same haunting, dead face; the one that plagued Craig’s nightmares, both living and sleeping.

Kenny’s nose did eventually bleed, but Craig and Ike both were less alarmed and more disheartened, knowing exactly what it meant—that the scrambling of his memories had sent him into a paralyzing shock, and progressed the disease just a little further. It was a process Craig had grown painfully familiar with. Ike tracked down an old rag and wet it with the condensation dripping down their cold centrifuge, and wiped the evidence of his blood and tears away. Kenny’s cleaned skin was nowhere near fresh, but instead a sickly pale color that glistened with a cold sweat. With a heavy sigh, Craig wrote down his symptoms one by one, in damning bullet points. He felt no need to rush, knowing the fate uncomfortably close to their reaches, a stark contrast between his measured manuscript and the frenzied chicken scratch from before- a written testament to the death of his resolve. At some point in their vigil, he had to find a candle to replace the one fizzling out in front of him, and he lit the new one with the old.

“Can we try anything else?” Ike asked, breaking over an hour of silence. Kenny had fallen unconscious at some point and was now near-convulsing in his sleep every few minutes, and though Ike kept him safely on the couch, there wasn’t much else he could do. Craig guessed it still made him feel a little better, a little more helpful.

“I don’t think it will matter,” Craig sighed. He picked at the ends of his disposable lab coat, pulling at the plastic so that it warped and stretched around his fingers. “This was our best bet.”

“Well,” Ike began, but he never continued. Craig looked up and caught his eyes just before he flicked them away, the muscles in his neck tensing while he obviously tried not to cry. “Well,” he said again, quieter and with a hard swallow, “alright.”

 

* * *

 

“You,” a weak voice inquired, causing them both to jump in alarm, “You guys,” Kenny whispered. Craig looked at Ike, and Ike at Craig. “H-hey-”

“Yeah?” Ike answered, perhaps a little too quickly, and Kenny tilted his head to look Ike in the face. Craig watched Ike go pale and his leg start shaking, faster and faster in its panic.

“Y’all remember,  _ mm” _ —Kenny paused to shiver and Ike held him steady—“when we sang stuff?”

Ike looked at Craig again, confused and pleading for help. “Sang stuff?” Craig asked, and Kenny coughed and groaned.

“Yeah, man, w-when we were real little, you know?” Kenny coughed again, harder, but when he finished, a smile graced his lips. “When we were forced ta, when we had ta do it.”

“You mean chorus?” Ike said, and Kenny laughed, something breathy and weak but genuine.

“Yeah, that shit. Y-yeah.” Kenny closed his eyes and let his head drop to the side, to face Craig while he whispered to them both. “Remember?”

“Yeah Kenny, I remember,” Craig said, softly.

“It’s about all I remember right now,” Kenny admitted, the tiniest of grimaces leaking past the serenity he’d been trying to convey. His eyes were still closed. “Man, I hated it.”

Ike laughed quietly. “Yeah, me too.”

“But you know what?” Kenny said, his voice soft and smooth, surprisingly relaxed for how much his body betrayed him with its involuntary twitching and jerking. “This damn, ah, th-this damn song we sung, it’s in my head.” He let out a heavy, knowing breath.

“Which one?” Craig asked.

“I dunno what it’s called,” Kenny muttered, “never paid attention, but it’s about… it’s about some old guy.”

“An old guy?”

The way they were speaking, it was as though to a child, to coax a story from a disoriented and disorganized mind. Piece by piece, moment by moment.

“Yeah, a-an old guy,” Kenny said, “and the snow.”

 

> _ He will not see me stopping here _
> 
> _ To watch his woods fill up with snow _

 

“That’s not very specific Kenny,” Ike said, a bit of teasing in his tone, but Craig stopped him with a hand raised in the air that Kenny wouldn’t see. His blood had run cold.

“That song,” he started, slowly and with care, “I know it too. It’s in my head too.”

Kenny’s eyes broke open, and the smile on his face grew wider. “Ah man, I’m glad I’m not, not the only one.  _ Whose woods these are I think I know,” _ he sang, shaky and strained but recognizable by Craig’s own nostalgic heart,  _ “his house is in the village though.” _ He paused for a cough, and let his head fall limp against Ike’s leg, exhausted. “Like that, y-yeah?”

“Yeah,” Craig breathed, “like that.” 

Craig’s heart was pounding, reinvigorated by the memory that Kenny drudged up within him. He’d thought of this song before too, unprompted, walking in winter’s bitter cold. His eyes watered beyond his control, and he turned away slightly as he tried to pull himself together. There wasn't time to start crying.

“What is it about that one, huh?” Kenny whispered. “Why’s that one in our heads?” He sighed. “D-don’t remember the end, though.”

Craig cleared his throat, and then Ike raised his eyebrows, but said nothing. “Can’t believe I’m gonna do this,” he muttered. Where had all that hardened, noncommittal aggression gone, the version of Craig Tucker that Kenny probably knew best? Where did this softness come from, that he would want to sing to a man soon to pass?

_ “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep,” _ Craig sang, just as shaky as Kenny’s rendition had been without the same excuse. Ike’s eyes felt like daggers into his fluttering chest full of embarrassment and a childish fear of judgment. He wasn’t much of a singer. Kenny’s comfort meant more to him than that, though, and so he sang.  _ “And miles to go before I sleep.” _

There was a beat of silence before anyone followed him. “That’s it, yeah,” Kenny whispered.

The hum of the machines all around them, completely out of commission while they held a dying man, gave the air a palpable energy that suppressed Craig’s breaths. It blanketed their own thicket of technology, shoved into a basement, unofficial, impractical, illegal.

“Hey,” Kenny said, his voice soft and lost, and Craig hated to think that it was possible that Kenny could not remember his name right then. “You know, i-it goes,  _ ‘and miles to go before I sleep,’ _ yeah?” Craig nodded at him. “Miles are pretty long. That’s… That’s pretty far.”

“Yeah,” Craig said, to keep him talking.

“I don’t think I got any miles t’go, man,” he said, and Craig felt his heart sink like a stone, thudding like a hot coal through his belly and poisoning his veins. “I ain’t got ‘em. Think you prob’ly do though, you prolly do.”

“What are you saying?” Ike asked, piping up after a long time of brooding silence from his end, and Kenny shifted his head just slightly to be able to catch Ike’s eyes.

“Yer young, this one. You know, I got a sister, younger like you,” he murmured, the adoration in his voice too much to bear knowing exactly where Karen McCormick lied, “an’ I love her. She’s gonna make it, I think. She’s got a strong heart, she’ll make it. Where is she?” Kenny asked.

“She’s okay,” Craig lied, reaching out to pat Kenny’s shoulder. “She’s alright.”

“Oh, good,” Kenny breathed through an uneven exhale, and he twitched so aggressively that he whimpered quietly after. Craig’s heart ached where it’d settled into the bottom of his stomach. “A-anyway,” he stuttered, “you got miles. You got ‘em. Use ‘em where I can’t.”

“Alright,” Craig agreed, his voice hushed to match Kenny’s, “I will.”

Kenny started to cry.

“Y’know, it wasn’t s’posed to happen like this,” he mumbled, as a tear welled enough in his eyelid to spill forth, dripping around the bridge of his nose to get to Ike’s lap. “Sure, the world was goin’ to shit, but this?” He shook his head slightly. “Not this. This wasn’t s’posed to be. I believe that, very strongly.” Then he went silent.

It wasn't until after Kenny went into another episode that Craig cried.

 

* * *

 

The clock was ticking towards four in the morning, and it was clear that Ike was exhausted, his posture drooping and dripping toward the floor but never letting to of Kenny’s head between his knees. When his head dropped from nearly falling asleep he jerked it back up, and kept himself away by petting Kenny’s hair. Kenny was, surprisingly, awake, though it was with a face devoid of emotion, the blank slate of Mutation B’s curse fully present. Craig was admittedly tired too, but at least he was slightly more used to this schedule. Ike would probably be halfway through his night’s sleep by now, normally. 

Kenny made a few warning blinks, a deviation which broke Craig’s own daze, and Ike sat up too, equally startled. Kenny cleared his throat, with a bit of a cough, and sighed. “You know, I’m a little sorry to be leavin’ you like this.” Kenny paused, but neither Craig nor Ike refuted his claim. How could they, when they knew it was true? That he was leaving? “Let me be an old soul though, give ya a proper goodbye.”

“You don’t have to-”

“Nah, I do, golden boy, I gotta. See?” he said with a small laugh, as Ike’s face screwed up in physical pain. “I ‘member that nickname, but I don’t remember yer real name. This sickness is weird, real weird, isn’t it?”

“It’s Ike,” he choked, and Craig looked away, before his eyes could leak the tears he’d forbidden himself from crying. He took that moment to find a piece of paper to jot down the instructions to test 14C again, per Kenny’s request, even if it sounded odd. He tucked it in the binder, and sat with his face in his palm on his chair while Ike and Kenny talked.

“Ike, yeah. Yeah. Why’d I call ya golden boy, a-anyway? Oh, don’t cry, bud. Don’t cry. It’s alright. I’ll come back.”

“You thought I was, um, smarter, than everybody. And I didn’t get in trouble. You didn’t really know me, but you knew my”—he paused to swallow hard, anguish in his eyes—“you knew Kyle and so you saw me around. You called me golden boy cuz I had a stick up my ass for being smarter than everybody else. I thought I was, anyway.”

Kenny laughed, the mirth in his face betraying the sickly body. “I’d believe that, yeah. I don’t think I really remember myself anymore, you know? I don’ think I’m all here, or all anywhere. I’m, nn-, I’m not here no more. Craig?”

Craig’s attention snapped back at his name. The pallor of death had conquered Kenny’s skin, and his lips had gone so white he could barely see them. It was amazing, really, that Kenny still remembered his name. He knew so little else.

“What do you need?”

“Oh, I don’t need nothin’,” Kenny said, dismissing him. “I jus’, ‘m just sayin’ stuff I know. I don’t know me though, I don’t know. I think I’d be more scared if I remembered anything, yeah? Prob’ly.”

Ike sniffed loudly, and Craig silently cleared his throat, swallowing past the lump straining it. “You don’t know you?” he asked, and Kenny nodded. His breaths were shallow and throaty.

“Don’t remember my name. What’s my name? I remember I got a sister, oh.” He stopped himself, growing somber. “Oh, tell Kare I love ‘er, will ya? I’m sorry t’ be leavin’ ‘er like this. She’s around your age, bud. Aw, man,” he rasped, “I don’t remember my own name.”

“Your name is Kenny,” Ike managed through his barely suppressed sobs.

Kenny was quiet for a moment, staring up at the ceiling. “Kenny, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, guess tha’s as good a name as any, right?” He got a chuckle out of Ike, and Craig suspected that was what he wanted. He was kind even in death. “Y-you think you could, uh,” he struggled with his next words, “um, help me? Could you tell me about me?”

Craig considered it.

He knew the risks involved in bringing to mind the memories that Mutation B had closed off, but Kenny looked so pained, so in need of this attention, that it felt worth the risk. He was already dying- he may as well get to go in peace.

He cleared his throat again. “Your name is Kenny,” he began, then took a while to figure out what he wanted to say. Before he continued, Kenny reached out and silently asked to hold his hand once more, which he did. His fingers were cold and weaker than even the last time he’d held them, but Craig helped them clasp his own with a sturdy grip. “You’ve always been a great brother. Your sister wa-uh, is, lucky to have you.”

“Mm, thanks, but I hope yer not just sayin’ it to be nice.”

“He’s not,” Ike assured, and he smiled despite his tearfulness. “Karen loves you. She knows you try hard for her and your family.”

“That’s nice,” Kenny sighed. Air whistled from his rib cage in gentle wheezes that split his smile open just enough to breathe. “D’you know if I lived? You know, was I happy?”

Both Craig and Ike were silent. They didn’t know Kenny very well, admittedly.

“You were always kind. You joked around but you were kind,” Ike said. “My mom used to say that you can tell someone’s lived by the kindness they give away. People who give away kindness know what it’s like not to have it. So I think you lived, yeah.”

Kenny hummed, and squeezed Craig’s hand the tiniest bit, but enough to notice. Craig answered by squeezing back. “Thank you,” Kenny said, so quiet he could hardly hear him. Ike ran his hand through Kenny’s hair and sniffled.

“No prob, man,” Ike said, his voice cracking on ‘prob’ and making his awkward crying voice even more difficult to understand.

They didn’t say anything else, after that. Kenny gave them both an appreciative grin, then slid his eyes closed slowly. He rested that way, his breaths choppy and loud, but not deep enough to speak anymore. Craig wondered if he was remembering anything then, when he was moments from letting go. He wondered if he was scared. He hoped their presence made him feel better.

Ike never stopped petting his hair, through all of the disastrous shaking and shivering, all the way until he went still.

He did go still, eventually.

Craig felt the pressure of Kenny’s fingers, wrapped in his own, dissipate, and his arm become entirely limp. At the same time, his quivering came to a stop, and his chest stopped trying to take in air. The last of his breath left his body in a slow exhale, calmer than it had been all day, and Ike let out a pained yelp when he realized what had happened.

Craig shifted his hold on Kenny’s hand to feel for a pulse in his wrist, and found none.

Kenny was gone.

  
  
  
  


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They didn’t stop holding him for a while after that. Eventually, Craig positioned Kenny’s arm to rest upon his own chest. His head had fallen to the side, and he could swear there was a tiny smile on his colorless lips. Ike was still crying, still petting Kenny’s hair with his own trembling fingers, until Craig’s gentle hands halted them by taking his wrist. 

“Ike,” Craig whispered, “it’s alright. We did what we could.”

“No,” Ike moaned between silent sobs, “we have to do something. We have to.”

“We did our best, Ike, we did everything right. We just don’t have the right serum yet.” The thought made Craig nervous—a little burst of chaotic energy in his chest, in the center of grief. They needed to find it. He couldn’t bear to imagine Tweek having an end like this, so full of confusion and pain. It was too much.

Ike yanked his hand from Craig’s hold and held it to his chest, and he curled up so that his forehead rested on Kenny’s sternum. Craig briefly wondered if it felt odd, to lie on the chest of someone no longer breathing.

“I’m sorry,” Ike whispered to the body. Craig hoped it would be enough for the both of them. He was sorry too. Guilty, and sorry.

He rose and wiped his face with his forearm with one last noisy sniffle, and looked at Craig with bloodshot eyes. “Okay,” he said. “Alright, let’s take him out.”

Craig nodded, and they used the blanket Kenny lied on as a swing hammock. They held him with care, stumbling as they tried to bring him up the steps, and brought him to the fenced in backyard of the house. Thankfully the rain had stopped, but it left the ground muddy and unstable. They laid him down and let the blanket fall around him.

It was an eerily beautiful moment, in the light of barely broken dawn. The sky was a pale orange bleeding into the deep blue of the night. Craig looked at Ike, who was already looking at him, and Craig got the sense that they had grown closer through the chaos they’d just endured. The tone was devastating, thinking of how they had failed, thinking of both the work they had ahead of them and the loss of their friend.  Craig, very truly and deeply, cried, with his hand in Ike’s. He let guilt consume him, let all of his emotions take over his heart and confuse it with a tangle of heartstrings. Guilt, sorrow, anger, _fear._

However, Craig didn’t have time to worry about the truck driving, or how to bury Kenny. Not before the scenery began to change. For some reason, he wasn’t frightened by it, in the moment. His world shifted away from that beautiful sunrise and back into the basement of his lab, with his clipboard in hand as he wrote down the results of his most recent test. Positive, positive, positive, all of them. Another batch of attempts, botched. He sighed and looked over at Ike, who was across from him counting plates. “Anything good?” he asked, and Ike shook his head.

“Nah. Same as always, really. I don’t feel like we’ve made much progress. Maybe we need to try a different approach.”

“Well,” Craig began, speech slowed by the powerhouse in his brain hitting overdrive, “14C was our most successful, reduction-wise.”

Ike looked up finally, his brow twisted up in confusion. “Wasn’t that one ineffective?” he asked. “I could swear something was wonky about that one. You got the notes?” 

Craig’s pen hesitated in his hand. That did sound familiar. He got up, and rounded the corner of his desk to get to their shoddy bookcase of binders. Finding the one labeled  _ ‘13-17,’ _ he tugged it from its place, and flipped through to 14.

Sure enough, there, in the very front of the section, was a torn sheet of paper. All it said was ' **INEFFECTIVE- TEST FOR REPLICABILITY'**  in big, thick, rushed letters.

“I guess we need to go over it more than I thought,” Craig murmured, and Ike hummed his agreement. “Can we pause on 28 for now and try this one again?”

Ike huffed, but he took the binder extended to him to view the piece of paper for himself, and uttered an annoyed but compliant, “I guess.”

He pulled the serum from their storage freezer, noting that the glorified ice box needed to be defrosted soon, and began to thaw a tube of 14C. They were quiet as Ike finished up what he’d been writing down and Craig rubbed the tube between his fingers to create the friction to melt it. “You think you could ask Kenny to find me some shoes?” Ike asked, unrelated, and Craig mumbled an affirmative. “Size 9, if you can. Thanks, bro.”

Something about Kenny felt odd to talk about, like a terrible sadness was lingering in the back of his heart, deep in a corner he didn’t understand. It was uncomfortable, and unexplainable. He tried to shake it off as best he could, and he turned the tube up and down to check if it was properly thawed. He placed it in the rack dedicated to the specimens to be tested next to Ike, who prepared to plate it. Then he heard a knock at the front door.

They both tensed, and looked up at the door to the basement that was currently closed. Craig was suddenly hyper-aware of his surroundings, the sound of the rain near-deafening in the moment alongside the pounding of his heart. Who knew they were here? Had they been caught, and would they die for it? He crept up the stairs with a hand shoved toward Ike, making him stay behind. He looked unhappy about it, but obliged, and Craig carefully pushed the basement door open.

Another knock rammed through his chest like a shockwave, mixed with the pouring rain, and he swallowed hard. He crouched low, padding carefully toward the door, and a third knock began before he could open it. He figured authorities would announce themselves at that point, and that made him feel a little better, but not by much. Carefully, as quietly as the lock would allow, he started to pull the door open.

There, on the doorstep, getting soaked to the bone and with a gigantic grin, was Kenny McCormick.

“Kenny?” Craig asked, extremely confused, but Kenny said nothing before diving in to give him a big hug. It got him almost equally soaked in the process, but he hugged back anyway.

“Jus’ wanted to thank you,” Kenny mumbled into his shoulder.

“Uh, alright,” Craig said, and Kenny pulled back and put both hands on Craig’s cheeks, his grin never wavering.

“You’re a good man, Craig. A great one. Yer a masterpiece, what you are.” Then he leaned in and smacked a wet kiss right in the center of Craig’s forehead.

“Kenny, what’s going on?” Craig asked, pulling his head from his hands and shaking his arm to get some of the water droplets off his sleeve. Kenny shook his head.

“You wouldn’t get it, jus’ know I ‘ppreciate ya. I appreciate you so much. And Ike too, tell that lil’ bastard I love ‘im, will ya?”

“Yeah, sure,” Craig said, just barely translating what Kenny was saying into English while he tried to figure out what it all meant. “Are we still good for Wednesday morning this week, or..?”

“Oh yeah, you bet!” Kenny said with a nod. “I’ll see ya at the ass crack a’ dawn, Craigster.”

“Don’t call me that,” Craig warned, but Kenny just laughed.

“See ya soon, bud, see ya soon,” he said, and though it was raining, Craig could’ve sworn he saw a tear make its way down Kenny’s cheek before he turned around and rushed down the street for his truck.

“Bye,” Craig said, into the rain where no one would hear, and he stared out into its translucent lines a moment longer, the dissonance creating a blank in his head where logic was meant to go. Ike startled him by touching his shoulder, breaking him from his confusion, and asked what happened. He told him it was Kenny.

“Kenny?” Craig nodded. “Huh, weird.”

When Ike turned to go back downstairs, he hesitated to close the door. There were things he wanted to yell into the silence of the night’s shower, but what those things were, he couldn’t decipher. “Weird,” he repeated, to himself but to the void as well, and as the faint despair in his heart faded, he shut the door on the weather, and tramped downstairs, to retest 14C.

He’d never remember why.


End file.
